(I apologize if something substantially similar to this goes out
twice -- I meant to send it to the list, but it seems to have fallen
in a hole...).
My last experience with RPMs, just under a year ago, convinced me that
they are basically broken. Every distribution has its own set, and
it's pretty much a crapshoot whether one distribution's packages will
work with another. Worse, one of them uses its own version numbering
which is incompatible with all the others (and with the ``standard''
versioning of the software in the packages), and uses higher numbers
so it will fool the package searching software into always thinking
their version is the most current. I got out during the incompatible
version 3 vs. version 4 RPM format debacle, before the 2.96 disaster.
Debian, on the other hand, appears to exert some sort of control over
their package maintainers that means a .deb package will either just
plain work, or will give me complaints about incompatibilities before
I download. I run the unstable distribution, and have rarely had
anything go wrong at all (the gimp-print problems being a conspicuous
exception, I'm afraid). doing a .deb package of Ardour wouldn't be
such a bad idea...
--
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
