My experience with RPMs, a little under a year ago, was that the whole
system is basically broken. All the different RPM-based distributions
have their own versions of the same packages, and it seems to be
basically a crapshoot whether a RedHat library will work with a SuSE
program... and one of the distributions has their own version
numbering scheme which is incompatible with all the rest, and always
convinces the package search tools that there's is the most up to
date.
When I switched to Debian, I don't quite know how they control it, but
it all just works. When I try to download a package it either works,
or I get informed about the incompatibilities.
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
SWNMRSEF: http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair
