On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 5:45 PM Dave Dykstra <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Yasha, > > Yes this is one of the most significant differences between the Debian/ > dpkg/apt world and the Red Hat/SUSE/rpm/yum/dnf world. It's a > difference in philosophy and it is reflected in the tooling. There are > a lot more explicit package version dependencies in Debian that makes > this possible. On the other hand there's a lot less backporting that > goes on there, so there's more instability. I think that the > requirement of going through extra effort every 5 to 10 years to do a > reinstall from scratch is a deliberate choice in the rpm world. I like > the relative ease of Debian upgrades, but it does have some > disadvantages too because you end up not upgrading some things. For > instance I haven't done a fresh install in around 20 years on my home > Debian server, so as a consequence it is still using 32-bit executables > even though the hardware has long been capable of 64-bit.
The process can be.... adventuresome for RHEL based operating systems. Circular dependencis involving glibc and RPM can cause issues, and a system built 3 years previously may have a subty distinct version of ext2 or now xfs. I've been bitten that way.
