[plug] Red Hat package management

[Craig Foster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-admin at plug.linux.org.au 
> [mailto:plug-admin at plug.linux.org.au] On Behalf Of John Clayton
> Sent: Tuesday, 25 November 2003 5:46 AM
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] Red Hat package management
> 
> Red Hat has a package management system. It has  package 
> installation, uninstallation and dependancy checking that 
> looks in a database to see what packages you have installed. 
> Everything else you have to do yourself. Its all command line 
> and there are black candles made especially for the purpose 
> of keeping evil spirits away while you install uninstall 
> upgrade and freshen your packages.

What, like the navigation/selections in dselect?

> Abandon Hope All Yee Who Enter The Domain Of RPM.
> 
> Those things like apt dselect and all those others that 
> recursively check dependancies and get all the bits and 
> pieces that you need without asking any hard questions take 
> all the fun out of life (-: and would more accurately be 
> called package and dependancy management systems.

How many times do people have to be corrected?!?!?!?

RPM is not designed for dependancy matching in and of itself. It has a
REQUIRES tag that specify required packages be pre-installed or installed at
the same time, but there is no specific RedHat *database* of dependancies.
Apt is for dependancies. So is YaST, yum, & URPMi. Note that these systems
all have a database. Even try running apt without doing a `apt-get update`
first?

> With RPM you get to manage the dependancies as you see fit 
> and get the opportunity to have all the fun that ensues when 
> you select the nodeps option. :-)

Please do not touch another RedHat machine again... Anyone who uses nodeps
with regularity either does not make, or use properly written RPMs, or
doesn't know how to manage RPMs. And if they are badly written RPMs, please
help the author fix them, this is a community effort you know...

<takes deep breath>

I don't like the amount of RPM bashing that happens every six months on this
list. Sure the default database only holds packages already installed, and
there is a general lower quality in the error checking of RPM packages, but
that's only half the story. The bulk of .debs are put through the Debian QA
procedure. It's yet another reason that debian releases are slower, and more
reliable, than other distributions. Anyway, some third party .debs are badly
written too. 

As for dependancies, Up2date was a decent first-go, nothing more. Apt has
been ported, yum is standard with Fedora, and URPMi is actually quite
useful. They all handle non-installed dependancies and automatic package
sourcing & downloading quite well.

<gets off soap box>

It's not meant as an attack on anybody. It's more that a simple answer of
"yes, but have you considered yum or apt-rpm" would have more than sufficed.
If this list was for bitchiness and snide comments it'd be called slashplug.

Regards,

Craig F.

PS As I RHCE I am proud to say that I've chosen quite a few machines
(including my laptop) to run debian. Always use the right software for the
job.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3057 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20031125/66739a8b/attachment.bin>