[ale] The bad thing about RPMs

[Mark Hurley]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 06:26:31PM -0500, Kevin Krumwiede wrote:
> I decided to replace my Mandrake installation with Linux From Scratch before
> I take another stab at getting rid of Windows.  RPMs are nice and all, but
> there's one big problem with them that needs to be addressed by the distros:
> stability in the libraries they're built against.  I'm tired of having to
> upgrade half the system every time I want to install a piece of software, or
> risk instability if I override the dependency checks.  I think that when Red
> Hat or Mandrake comes out with a new major version, they should freeze the
> library versions until the next major update.  That way, an RPM built on,
> say, Mandrake 8.1 could be installed on Mandrake 8.0 without upgrading a
> dozen other packages.
> 
> What do y'all think of my little theory?

Just wanted to comment on the "Linux From Scratch".  I've seen it
mentioned several times by a few others.  Rather than do the painful
LFS you can always grab the "Gentoo" installation.

Gentoo basically has scripts that grab the actual 'tar.gz' from the
various websites and compiles everything from source.  I actually
tested it a few months ago, while it took a long time, it ran nicely
on the 1Gz...then again what wouldn't! ;)

Of course, not to get into a package war, but Debian's packages IMHO
are superior to RPM's.

You can read up more on Gentoo at:

http://www.gentoo.org/


Mark

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