On Thu, 2009-07-30 at 20:14 -0400, Anthony Carrico wrote: > jonathan d p ferguson wrote: > > I'll break off my argument here, just before it turns into a > > proselyting bit for The One True Debian Way :D > > I'll pick up your thread. So, why were dependencies done so much better > in Debian? My impression is that there was an economic bias. Back then, > RedHat made their money selling CDROMS, so their incentive was to > prepare a big X.Y upgrade and sell the disks. Debian didn't care about > selling anything, so they could support continuous incremental upgrades > over the network (which was a huge improvement over RedHat). This > difference got baked in, and these roots still shade the character and > release disciplines of the two distributions. I'll let someone else > carry the story to Ubuntu. > Frankly, RedHat should just adopt urpmi and be done with it - Mandrake (now Mandriva after they bought Connectiva Linux a few years back) has had proper, functioning (excellent, even!) dependency checking since the late nineties. Yum was not in existence, and remains to this day the bastard child of the real RPM power tool that inspired it. Yum is a big upgrade from standard RPM, but it pales in comparison with urpmi - (similar to how most Unix OSes are like a pale shadow of the powerhouse that Linux has become).
Rubin -- Rubin Bennett rbTechnologies, LLC 80 Carleton Boulevard East Montpelier, VT 05651 (802)223-4448 http://thatitguy.com "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." Voltaire, Essay on Tolerance French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)
