On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 12:15:09PM -0400, Vince Weaver wrote: > On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, David Zakar wrote: > > ><cheapshot>Although I guess, unlike some inferior distros, they actually > >bothered to use a package manager. I heard some distros are still stuck > >back in 94 on that score...</cheapshot> > > I'll take the bait. I must admit that in all my years of using slackware > I've never, ever, felt the need for a package manager with dependency > support (which is what I guess you mean, because Slackware definitely has > a package manager. It's even called "installpkg"). > > I have on the otherhand, loudly and frequently cursed rpm on both redhat, > fedora, and suse for being horribly difficult to use at times.
[*not* trying to start a flame war] I agree that on a single user/single admin network, package management is not really necessary. However, it's really darn useful when you have 300+ machines each with custom tweaks. "I want to install FOO on machine BAR. Now, is this the machine with glibc 2.2.3 and the custom X install with nvidia driver, or the machine with glibc 2.3.x compiled with stackguard? Oh well, I will just let rpm/yum/alien/emerge figure it out...". Granted, they don't always figure it out correctly, but it works well enough in most cases. .02cents - Rob .
