On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, Chris Barnes wrote: > After hearing alot of people flame the rpm system I have finally decided > that they were right for doing so. I have had endless problems with the rpm > system on my mandrake system.
because what we really need is more flaming. > > I was simply trying to update FreeType from 1.3 to 2.0 fso that my wine > installation would stop complaining. so I decided to remove FreeType 1.3 > because it wouldn't upgrade to 2.0...but to do that i had to remove a heap > of other dependnecies like php-gd, ghostscript, libSDL, fonts-ttf, VFlib, > XFre86-libs. Ok. You *don't* and *can't* upgrade from 1.3 to 2.0. They're different libraries with different APIs. RPM was quite right in saying that you'd break all that stuff if you uninstalled 1.3. This is why they have different package names. freetype and freetype2. If they had the same package name it would let you do the upgrade, having different package names allows you to install them in parallel. you'll notice that debian has a similar convention (though just looking through "apt-cache search freetype" on our token debian computer here seems to show a slightly counter-intuitive variant in this case) > > to uninstall those I had to also uninstall a heap of their dependencies as > well. anyway i've been at it for an hour and a half straight. I've had 5 > errors saying "db3 error(-30985) from db->verify: DB_VERIFY_BAD: Database > verification failed" that sounds like a problem with your setup. Not rpm. Have you tried rpm --rebuilddb? See, I've managed to destroy debian package databases, the SunOS package system (though I never learnt enough about it to know if it had a package database or not), RPM and even systems without package managers. I normally manage to do this by somehow misusing the system. Last time I managed to do that I killed rpm rather forcefully while it was trying to stat a broken NFS mount. The operating system stopped it, RPM had no way to know what was happening. Anyway, rpm --rebuilddb did a reasonable job of picking up the pieces afterwards. RPM is just a convenient wrapper for installing programs. It's more or less equivalent to dpkg. It's not a complete solution for software management - that's the job of other software which normally ships with linux distros these days. > > the rpm system is just a mess. I couldn't find any front end which could > simplify the removal of all these dependencies...probably because there were > so many branching off others so its all being done by hand. rpmdrake drakconf urpmi freetype2 > > I wouldn't be supprised if my system fails to work properly afterwards. Either would I. Considering the amount of stuff you've uninstalled I'd suggest you use an automatic dependancy resolving program to recover or it could take some time. HTH James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
