Hello David, Sunday, June 16, 2002, 2:40:34 PM, you textually orated:
DT> Hal Burgiss wrote: >>> http://distrowatch.colug.net/article-rpm.php >>> >> >>Wow, along with his disclaimer about being biased, he should add he >>has little knowledge of the subject matter. He overstates so many >>things, it is more FUD than anything. DT> I have my differences with the author's conclusions, to be sure. I'm DT> not sure I'd place so much blame squarely on RPM's shoulders. I think DT> it's fair to suggest that much of the difficulty discussed here is DT> merely a symptom of the fragmentation of distributions. It's not RPM's DT> fault that LSB is being widely disregarded, for instance, nor is it DT> something for which RPM can reasonably be expected to compensate. This is what bothers me most about the article. It seems that his beef is really with the lack of standards in file system layout and default included libraries/etc. Technically, all of the alternate solutions he offered (Debian / Slackware / Gentoo / source) all suffer from the same flaw that RPM does, "If it wasn't built for your distro, it _may_ not work" (in the case of source, it's "if you haven't yet installed the dependency needed to compile"). I think Debian has done one of the better jobs of having packaged everything under the sun, so it often makes apt seem quite superior. But it will only work for Debian. If apt were "better" then RPM, it would work cross distro. Red Hat Network can duplicate apt perfectly fine (solving dependencies, easy updates, etc.), but it just doesn't offer the same breadth that Debian does when it comes to available packages. Source can be more nightmarish than anything. If it wasn't for RPMfind, I may never have found where to even get some tarballs to solve compiling dependencies. "./configure" will tell you something is missing, but wont tell you where to get it. Doesn't sound any better then RPM to me. ;) RPM is certainly not the be-all-end-all, but it is a useful tool. As are the others mentioned in the article. Use what works for you. Have fun, -- _________________________________________________________________ Brian Ashe CTO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dee-Web Software Services, LLC. http://www.dee-web.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
