> The first one "installs" your RPM package for your system. The main > problem with this one is "What if the RPM package you want to install > has a lot of dependencies?". The best thing you would do is either you ... > - The second one "installs" or "upgrades" the RPM package you want to > install. If your URPMI database found that the RPM package you want to > install is a newer version and you have an older version of that > package, except for "kernel", it will automatically "upgrade" it only. > Now, if it has dependencies, it will search from any of your CDs or from > any URPMized mirrors (this is only applicable if you add media from any > mirrors). ... many more lines snipped.
The complicated processes and issues you have described precisely encapsulates my objection to the usage of rpm and other stuff built on it. You end up worrying about a whole raft of things which are not directly related to the usage or understanding of the package itself. Now, not only do you need to know rpm, you need to know urpm! Having a tool built upon a tool upon yet another tool means that the potential for breakage or confusion is pretty high. Note that the Unix philosophy is not tool _atop_ tool but more tool _side-by-side_ with other toolS. For Slackware packages, someone mentioned a tool called checkinstall earlier, which as far as I can tell is also a tool that tries to do something 'The Wrong Way'. In this particular case as well as rpm, 'The Wrong Way' is automation that seems to help beginners at the start but ends up creating more headaches, problems, and complexities for the user when situations which require human intervention arise often but the chain of automation gets in the way of manual tweaking (often severely). I fail to see why one would need checkinstall to automate a process which is quite easy to learn and do manually and for which, when deviations from the norm are encountered, require manual intervention anyway, intervention which is likely made more difficult if you use checkinstall: http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/faq.php My requirement for a 'package system' is extremely simple. I want to be able to install the N files in a package and on uninstallation, remove all N files with a single command. That is the one thing I don't want to have to worry about and which can be safely automated. The other requirement, dependencies and prerequisites is, in my experience, too fluid and ever-changing to entrust to an automated system. That is, attempting to automate the installation of dependencies and prerequisites actually leads to more lost time as situations often arise when you will have to work around inflexibilites incurred by the automation. Way I see it, you can't make a program smart enough to understand all the ad hoc situations prerequisites and dependencies put you in. Thus putting the burden on the human to know these actually means less work than trying to 'teach' them to a package system. When I was starting out, I thought dependencies were neat and welcomed the kind of hand-holding rpm gave, but when I started to learn more about Linux, understood the interaction of its pieces better and felt more confident in adding and removing functionality, the hand-holding turned out to exact too high a price in terms of maintenance, extra baggage and lost flexibility. I'd rather spend my time working towards Linux guruhood than rpm guruhood (which I can't help but see as an attempt to learn rpm well enough to work around the barriers that usage of it created in the first place!!), and that's why I'm very very happy with the distro I'm currently using. My non-adoption of Gentoo is driven by a similar concern as Portage looks like a pretty complex piece of software. Maybe when I get even better at Linux can finally afford to truly harness the power of a source based distribution and Portage... _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
