Democracy TV

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> >On Sunday 03 December 2006 10:10, lowell wrote:
> > > Would getting the tarball and building it on the machine work any
> > > better than stepping into rpm hell with the binary?

> >RPM Hell?  Where are you living, 1992?  Use up2date or yum.

On Sunday 03 December 2006 16:12, Dale Beams wrote:

> Or better yet, use a rpm-less distro.

How would that be better?

Seriouly, "RPM Hell" is nothing but FUD.  The RPM system was designed to get 
you OUT of dependency hell by telling you up front what packages you needed.  
With on-line repositories came RPM management scripts that handled finding 
those dependencies for you, and that was a LONG time ago.

All software systems have dependencies.  The only possible alternative is to 
include redundant code in all software packages.  What I can't understand is 
why people would rather find out about missing dependencies through a failed 
compile rather than be told up front "you're going to need this list of 
additional files".  Download, make, fail, download, make,  fail seems pretty 
stupid to me, and I've been there.

People who talk about "RPM Hell" are mostly those who never bothered to learn 
anything about the RPM system, and quite possibly were new to linux when they 
had their problems.   Experience gained on other distros led them to believe 
RPM was to blame for their troubles, which were more likely self-induced.  
They developed loyalty to the other distro, and possibly due to RedHat's 
commercialism enjoy spreading FUD about a perfectly good distro and an 
excellent package management tool.

That said, I think there are better distributions around these days than 
Fedora, including several excellent RPM based ones.