Entries published on March 3, 2008
Victory for the web
“Standards” means “standards”. Thank you for listening.
Now. Anybody out there who’s relying on version-specific quirks, get off your ass and fix your sites. It’s 2008, for crying out loud.
Dependencies.
Once upon a time, I was doing a server setup at work, installing all the various prerequisites and utilities to support the things we use. One part of that involves installing Jing, which we use for XML validation; Jing is written in Java, and so we use gcj
(the GNU Java compiler) to compile it for use, ending up with a nice little binary we can call from anywhere.
Now, we’ve standardized on Ubuntu for our servers, so installing gcj
should be as simple as apt-get install gcj
(or, more often, aptitude install gcj
, since aptitude
is a bit nicer). But when I did that I was greeted with a dizzying array of required dependencies, including an X11 window server and a whole raft of graphical toolkit libraries; all told, gcj
had, at that time, 44 required dependencies, and around 60 when “recommended” packages were included.
Yes, you …