Mageia forum

I can't seem to find it in the repositories and I haven't had luck installing from tarball. Does Mageia have a nethack package?

No, nethack isn't packaged yet. What issues did you face in particular when installing from tarball?

Well, I found an RPM on rpmfind labeled Mga6. When I dowloaded and tried to install I got a message about dependencies so I went o the nethack site and downloaded their rpm, which still needed a ncurses library - (lib64ncurses.o.6) - which I thought I had installed. My work around was to get the package from sourceforge and open it with Mageia's software installer. That method downloaded and installed the dependencies also.


I'm just guessing here, but I think the rpm for cauldron required a newer version of the 64bit ncurses lib. Does anyone else ever play this game? I'm not the greatest hacker, but maybe I'll try to create a package of nethack for Mageia myself.

tkmm wrote:Well, I found an RPM on rpmfind labeled Mga6.
[...]
I'm just guessing here, but I think the rpm for cauldron required a newer version of the 64bit ncurses lib.

As it's built for mga6, it's built against the cauldron libraries so it's pretty natural that you cannot install that on mga5 - furthermore you completely omitted that part in your inital question.

Sorry. I didn't realize that Cauldron was that much different. I wrongly assumed that because it was built for a version of Mageia that it would work with mine. This is probably a very general question but, why do some RPMs offer to install the dependencies while other's will complain and die?

tkmm wrote:This is probably a very general question but, why do some RPMs offer to install the dependencies while other's will complain and die?

It's not general, but the implication is just wrong.
Some RPMs are built for the currently used distro or use pretty generic/portable dependencies and can hence be installed without issues
For others the dependencies are just not fulfilled and hence cannot be installed.

RPM Provides/Requires are simply arbitrary tokens, and if no facility of any package in the configured repos matches exactly, then that token is not satisfied and hence the package cannot be installed.

That makes sense. Is it safe to assume that this effects backwards compatibility as well? eg: A package designed for Mageia 3 or 4 may be too outdated to work on the current stable version?

It affects backwards compatibility in the same way. If the package works fine, all good. If it doesn't, it needs to be adapted and/or rebuilt for the current release.

Thank you for taking the time to educate me. I've begun reading this: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packaging_for_beginners and Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development. Do you have any other recommendations for getting familiarized with how linux, and Mageia specifically, works?

Well, Mageia does not work differently then other open source projects in general, although this seems to be quite diverging from the original topic which was more about library and packaging-specific stuff.
As kernel development and packaging software are pretty different subjects, I cannot recommend anything as I'm not sure what you're really looking for ... ?