[plug] Re: Irony

[Christian]

Bradley Browne wrote:
> 
> 
> I think it is time for a distribution war to calm everyone's nerves ;-)
> 
> I just forcibly installed GNOME on my Redhat 5.2 box from a PC World
> Disk.  It was too much trouble to individually seek out the dependencies
> so I just did "rpm -i --nodeps --force *" figuring I could always
> reinstall the lot from scratch because I have most things on CD.
> 
> My points are these : how can I just select a package to install and
> then based on the dependencies rely on rpm to prompt me to
> upgrade/install other packages that are present so that I don't have to
> hunt around for them.  Also what kind of problems am I causing for
> myself by doing this, assuming I have a pretty stock standard 5.2 system
> ? :P

A distribution war, did you say? ;-)

What you've just described is exactly what Debian does for you.  You
tell it the package(s) you're interested in and it does the rest.  Goes
and finds out which others you need, which (if any) to get rid of, tells
you how much data it needs to download and how much disk space will be
taken up and then prompts you if you want to continue. :)

Regards,

Christian.

BTW, I did hear somewhere of an alternative for Red Hat which someone
had written - but I doubt it would have the same supporting
infrastructure that the Debian package system has.  It still might be
worth looking into for those die-hard Red Hatters...

-- 
========================================================================
I'm not trying to give users what they want, I'm trying to give them
freedom, which they can then accept or reject. If people don't want
freedom, they may be out of luck with me, but I won't allow them to 
define for me what is right, what is worth spending my life for.
                                                    - Richard Stallman