[plug] Re: Irony

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Thu, 6 May 1999, Bradley Browne wrote:
> I think it is time for a distribution war to calm everyone's nerves ;-)
You asked for it.

> 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.
Easy: Use Debian. This is what APT is for - tell it the package you really
want and it will hunt down and install the dependencies for you at the
same time. That's what _I_ call "Slack"-ware.
Dselect does it too, and is a more standard and older part of the
distribution, but it's kinda klunky.

> Also what kind of problems am I causing for myself by doing this,
> assuming I have a pretty stock standard 5.2 system? :P
Porbably none at all. In the past, jumping back and forth in versions of
Redhat packages has been dangerous, but these days it's usually pretty
safe. I haven't heard of anything ugly happening with Redhat package
management since the move to GNU libc. (RH5)
Of course RH5.1 had problems on virgin installs, but that wasn't a
version-conflict thing.

> On GNOME, I am really impressed.  I was expecting some limited kind of
> functionality but I was a little dumfounded at the extent to which these
> apps have been developed.
I am impressed at the quantity, but not the quality. I think more time
could have been spent on the infrastructure before they started writing a
thousand different apps and themes to use that infrastructure.

But yep, GNOME is pretty cool.

-Greg