This is a good post. many of the problems (like Chris W's with celestia) occur because of library versions and their (mis)naming. An rpm or deb binary is compiled against the distro's standard libraries for that version. Thereofre if you try and install celsetia.rpm compiled for Man 9 on a Mna 8 system you _can_ run into problems.
However with source compilation you get less of these problems, because it is often possible to compile against a different library version, its just that the binary package was compiled against something different. Therefore if you have these problems it is often possible to download the source rpm, compile the source rpm and have a running package. The advantage of the source rpm over the package author's source.tgz is that the source rpm may include patches and compile options for your particular architecture and distro. You can also see exatly what those patches and options are, and change them if you need or want to. Or, move to a source distro like gentoo, of which I am a fan, but not an absolute zealot. :-) On Thu, 03 Apr 2003 22:02:51 +0100 Jim Cheetham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 08:02:56AM +1200, Jason wrote: > > Chris, with all due respect, you are wrong IMHO. URPMI works GREAT and I > > have yet had it to fail for me... > > ... > > BTW, there are basically 3 ways to install software in Linux, APT, RPM > > and from Source. All have their benefits but with modern packaging > > systems dependency hell is a thing of the past for the most part. > > Dependancy hell is still present in all software distribution methods. > ALL of them ... > > The only way to avoid dependancy problems is to only use packages from a > single coherent authority. The moment you try to mix-and-match (which is > very common, because whatever package authority you use, will have > different goals and interests to yourself) you open yoursef up to > dependancy problems. > > The moment you have anything on your system that did not arrive through > your packaging system, problems start to brew. > > This has nothing to do with the actual packaging system in use, be it > RPM, apt, or anything. It's a function of how closely you follow the > updates from your central authority. > > Now, rpm has been criticised in the past, because a package could tell > you that it had unsatisfied dependancies, but had no way of telling you > how to satify them. I understand that this has been largely addressed > with the systhesis list feature. > > Debian's packaging system had a better knowledge of the "whole world", > and such apparently unresolveable dependancies were much rarer. BSD > ports is also much more tightly controlled, and less likely to fail. > Gentoo seems to have it's packages in order, too ... as does Fink for > OSX. > > However, all of them will cause problems if you don't update often > enough. Eventually a package version will come out that needs an update > to a core package - one that either you don't feel like downloading, > because it's too big, or you don't want to install, because it will > require downtime/reboot, or other large-scale changes to your system. At > that point in time, you begin to diverge from the central authority, > because your goals are different from theirs :-) > > A couple of examples - I have a FreeBSD server that has a version of NTP > thats got a security vulnerability. The fix is a newer version, but > that's only been issued for the 'current' version of FreeBSD, not the > one I'm running. Either I upgrade my whole OS, which involves downtime > on the server, or I do without the ntp package. Planning to upgrade the > OS takes a lot of time, it will happen "eventually". In the meantime, I > have removed the vulnerable NTP package. > (To be fair, BSDs are often set up to download and build everything, but > they don't actually install anything until you ask for it ... which is > similar to having a binary distribution, at one level) > > On my Mac, I'm running X and many useful programs, but it's on the end > of a slow dialup link. I've installed The GIMP, so I have all the GTK > libraries. I'd like to use Konqueror, but I haven't yet got any of the > KDE libraries, and they're huge. So I won't install Konqueror, because I > don't want to spend n hours of my life handholding the modem through the > required downloads. > > So, if you're happy with the choice of packages your central authority > pumps out, you have the bandwidth to download them all, and you don't > mind occasional downtime while installing them ... then you're probably > running a workstation on an office LAN. In which case, you'll probably > be completely happy with urpmi :-) and Mandrake ... > > -jim > -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
