On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, Chris Barnes wrote: > >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. I disagree, but hey. Jeff's just posted something that mirrors my sentiments here, so I won't belabour the subject. > > >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. The thing I objected to was making that simple statement sound like a problem with RPM. It's not. If anything it's a case of the original freetype not being designed for the future, but even that's harsh. I work in software development and sometimes you just can't get around having to make an incompatible library. Installing them both or using wrappers is a sensible solution IMHO. > > >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. ah. ok, that's a little more informative. I have freetype and freetype2 installed on this box and on my desktop (8.2 and cooker FWIW). Now, did you install mandrake packages of those files? If you got redhat RPMs then this sort of thing may well happen. I'm guessing that whatever RPMs you're using do things the debian way and make freetype a wrapper for freetype2. Either way is fine, as long as you're installing the same way for both freetype and freetype2. Note once again that RPM informed you of the problem. It didn't break the system. Try grabbing the freetype and freetype2 rpms from the same place and doing rpm -Uvh freetype.rpm freetype2.rpm (substituting useful names of course) > >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. fair enough. Uninstallation is a hard problem. I've written many a one line perl script to try to solve this in the past. The problem is this - say for example that you're trying to uninstall something that depends on postfix, and it's the only program on your system that depends on postfix. Should your computer uninstall postfix just because there is nothing that relies on it? IIRC windows tries to do this sort of thing with unused dlls. It would also break anything that wasn't installed from a package. I don't think any package manager has really solved the uninstallation problem well (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd be fascinated to know about it) Anyway, if you're interested in solving your problem give us some more info and we can try to help out. James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
