[ale] The bad thing about RPMs

[Fulton Green]

And one thing I've noticed a LOT of recently is that Red Hat will actually
ship with several different revisions of the same libraries, e.g.:

# rpm -qa | grep ^openssl | sort
openssl295-2.9.5-4
openssl296-2.9.6-3
openssl296b-2.9.6b-2
openssl-2.9.6c-1

The idea is so that if you need to download the bleeding-edge openssh
packages, which are dependent on openssl-2.9.6c, but didn't want to download
everything else that depended on the shared library that ships with
openssl-2.9.6b, you could simultaneously install the openssl296b package and
upgrade the openssl package. Of course, if mod_ssl and the other secure
socket-dependent packages stake their dependency specifically on a
particular version of the openssl *package* and NOT the version of the
openssl *shared library*, then it's all for naught, and you'll be
downloading all the other (presumably upgraded) secure socket-dependent
packages.

Which begs the question as to why Red Hat can't just package different
revisions of the same openssl package, e.g.:

# rpm -q openssl
openssl-2.9.5-4
openssl-2.9.6-3
openssl-2.9.6b-2
openssl-2.9.6c-1

Since I begged, I'll concede one answer: it's not intuitively obvious to
casual package installers (i.e., humans like myself doing it through the
command line) that different versions may need to coexist (which happens
all the time with the kernel package(s)) instead of the newest version
replacing all others.

That, to me, is one of the glaring shortcomings of RPM.

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 04:54:25PM -0700, Chris Ricker wrote:
> that's not untotally different from how Red Hat operates.  All releases
> within a major version are compatible with each other (so software compiled
> on 7.2 should run on 7.0, and vice-versa).

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