[plug] rpm's for diff platforms?

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 12:49, Senectus . wrote:

> Very informative thanks.. :-)
> So just out of interest.. why is it Gentoo handles dependencies so
> damn well yet RPM which has been around so much longer and has a
> larger user base does not?

I would argue that it is not the job of RPM or dpkg to handle automatic 
dependency resolution. That's what tools like apt, urpmi, and yum do and
do well. Gentoo's software management system integrates the two
functions (reasonably enough).

In the end Gentoo's dependency management seems less effective than that
of Debian. Not because of limitations of the system, but because less
testing and care goes into ensuring all dependencies are covered
correctly, so sometimes it is possible to upgrade one thing and break
another thing that depends on it. Debian has ages to test and check
dependencies and a very strict policy; at Gentoo's pace the "Debian way"
would probably be impractical.

> or is it not fair to compare them....

More that you're comparing an engine to a complete car. It just doesn't
make sense.

> I managed to find evolution 2.0.1 for fedora (because suse doesn't
> have an rpm of it believe it or not 0.o) and there are 20 something
> dependencies I have to go and find to make it work.. what are the
> chances that I will have to find dependencies for some of the
> dependencies? *shudder*

I rarely find this to be a problem on most modern distros, thanks to the
availability of automatic dependency resolution tools. Debian is the
only one that makes it really low-pain, but that's mostly due to the
sheer work that goes into quality packaging in Debian and at places like
backports.org . 

The variety of different tools used under RPM based distros also seems
to reduce the number of proper repositories available, something I hope
will change in time. People also seem more inclined to stay on older
verisons, perhaps because upgrading most RPM-based distros is harder, so
that further complicates packaging. Grr.

Evolution packages are perfect candidates for dropping in a repository
so you can just 'yum install evolution' or whatever. The problem is you
need to make something like four different kinds of repository for
countless distros and versions. Arrggh.

--
Craig Ringer