On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 11:49, Buchan Milne wrote: > The big arguments against linux for home use are that software > installation is too difficult. We can counter that, and say that it's > just as easy. Download an rpm, double-click on it, and if you know the > root password, you can install it.
I'm not convinced we ought to be encouraging people to do this. More than half the whining about how crap RPM is as a packaging system is down to people misusing it, and the major form of misuse is the installation of inappropriate RPMs. Way too many people download, for e.g., Red Hat RPMs and try to install them on Mandrake, assuming that this is right. It's not. It needs to be clearly stated that it isn't, and this type of behaviour doesn't need any encouraging, because it'll just lead to more broken distributions and whining lusers. (Just for an example, there was a guy in #abiword who spent two days bugging people trying to make Abi 1.1.3 compile. It turned out all his problems came because he had a Mandrake 9.0 box, wanted Xft in Abiword, so he'd just downloaded the Cooker Xft2 RPM and installed it. As you can probably guess, this didn't work...) In my opinion, if you want to install a binary RPM, you should use only the one that's made for *your* version of *your* distribution and released by *your* vendor. If the program isn't available in this form, compile it. If anyone ever designs a packaging system where this is no longer necessary, woohoo. While we're using RPM, we shouldn't be encouraging people to download and install any old RPM at random. rpmdrake should be enough. -- adamw
