On 6/8/06, Joshua Penix <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Jun 6, 2006, at 4:22 PM, Carl Lowenstein wrote:
> Yes. Searching of Google Groups and other places shows that this (not
> being able to install programs from the CD) is a new improved feature
> of FC5.
>
> Grr.
Well here's the problem... binary dependencies. If you install a new
FC5 from CD and then don't do any updates to it, you can reasonably
expect to install more packages from the CD without running into any
sort of dependency errors.
But let's say that your FC5 system has PHP installed, and after
installation a security update for PHP was released. You update your
FC5 system accordingly with yum or up2date and continue on your way.
But three weeks later, you decide that you'd like to add the LDAP
module to PHP. You can't install it from CD, because that copy was
built against the older PHP version. Instead you need to get the new
matching module from an update mirror, again with a tool like yum or
up2date.
This is a situation that system-config-packages was not built to
handle. As soon as you apply security updates to a Fedora
installation, the utility effectively became broken. I believe
that's why it was removed. Better to have no utility than to have
one that worked inconsistently.
Of course a regular GUI-oriented user should not have to know the
underlying intricacies and limitations of the package management
system. They should be able to just fire up a tool, pick the
packages they want, and have them installed either from CD (if the
dependency tree allows), or from updated online sources when
necessary. Other distributions have such capable tools (synaptic,
YaST), and I hope that the disappearance of Fedora's braindead
version indicates that a new one is in the works.
As part of the push to get rid of "obsolete" tools, FC5 has also
removed synaptic and all the other APT-associated utilities. I don't
know whether there is a corresponding thing that could be done with
YUM. Thinking about it.
carl
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carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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