[plug] RE: plug RedHat 5.1

[The Thought Assassin]

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, John Summerfield wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > IMHO, if a package has a priority (i.e. required, important, standard,
> > optional) and clear dependencies, that is all the newbie needs to know.
> > I don't know of a system that gives more, anyway.
> Cetainly there are (well, I expect there are) dependencies. However, those
> don't help a novice whether the package is useful.
Mixed with priorities, they are more than enough.
Install everything marked "important" or higher, install whatever things
in "standard" you aren't sure you won't need, resolve the dependencies in
such a way that the first rule still holds.

> (I have to say it's getting hard to remember those packages that had me
> completely bamboozled the first time I installed Linux.)
The first time I installed Linux, it was as simple as the above.
I didn't remove any packages that were listed as "standard", I just added
some packages from lower priorities and whatever they depended on.
I got a few conflicts, so I removed a few things I had selected. (but
nothing from important or above)
Horribly easy. The only real problem I had was that I was installing via
ftp, and back in the dim dark days, pppd had a default baud rate of 9600,
unbeknownst to me. Obviously, it was slow going for a while there, but 
Matt soon spotted my error, and everything was happy.
Had more trouble with )(, but that was in the days before X-configurator
programs made it easy for us.
Most people have similarly easy runs with Redhat, from what I hear, so I
don't think that Debian is aline in this. Dependency resolution is not as
sophisticated as in Debian, but I've not heard of people being unable to
resolve them.

-Greg