>because what we really need is more flaming. well actually i didn't intend on "flamming" as such, I felt people should really know why rpms are such a poor idea because no one ever told me why they suck, they just said "they just do!".I was especially aiming this towards new people deciding on a distribution because if they chose redhat or mandrake then its going to be very hard for them to avoid rpms since the redhat/mandrake installers use the rpm system so they'll be stuffed from the start.
>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. I wasn't trying to upgrade from 1.3 to 2.0...i was simply stating how difficult it was going to be for me to install 2.0 simply because i cannot upgrade from 1.3...i was trying to state the inconvienience. >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. I did actually try to install freetype2 in parallel with freetype but the message i received from rpm was this: file /usr/lib/libttf.so.2 from install of freetype-2.0.9-2 conflicts with file from package freetype-1.3.1-12mdk so it appears that I cannot infact install both freetype and freetype2 in parallel. > > 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 drakconf had to go. it used fonts that were dependent on one of the packages i was trying to uninstall. but before i tried to uninstall the package i did actually try drakconf..actually I tried all the package managers installed on my system and not one of them could handle the uninstallation of freetype-1.3.1...and none of them could handle the uninstallation of XFREE86-libs which is depended on by quite a large amount of packages on my system (namely kde and all its little extras like kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, kdebase, kderootwarning, kdetoys, kdeadmin, krozat, xpat, licq, nautilus, mozilla-nautilus and alot of those have dependencies of their own as well. I'm more than halfway through completing destroying the system by hand so I dont think i'm going to worry about finding a proper working frontend at this time. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
