[ale] KDE reinstall

[James P. Kinney III]

What yast and apt2rpm do is to keep an internal database of known
packages and their associated dependencies. You get a similar effect by
loading the redhat-rpm-database package (it may be called something else
rpm-db?) that has a full listing of all the rpm's that ship with a
particular RedHat release and how they interact. 

The key thing here, and it's not Linux only, it's every OS, is that
binary files are linked to particular libraries. Change the libs and
problems happen. A large part of a new release for all of the distros is
the lib test phase (does every package we want to include run with the
library set we are using). 

With Slackware, this is never a big problem as everyone (usually)
installs from source tarballs anything new they want. The downside is
the lack of detailed data about what is installed and what it uses.
That's why every other major player has some sort of dependency tracking
system.

What Debian has done is to heavily standardize on their libs and do very
slow releases. So apt-get has a long data life. But you still have to
install _all_ the new libs for a major upgrade for, say KDE or Gnome.
Apt-get simply has the centralized location of where to get it built in.
RedHat Network does the exact same thing.  I don't use Mandrake at all,
nor Suse much (beta enterprise AMD64 server is the ONLY place to get a
jdk for the opteron right now).

On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 15:45, Zyman, Andy wrote:
> //About Yast and company
> hmmm. and what is difference between rpm and these tools? 
> I have suse 8.1, but i decided ( why , i don' know ) that i don't like it.
> And one of the reasons was - no many rpms for it.
> 
> "source" way ... I'm not sure that I'll be brave enough to get in to the
> mess (?) of the million files without (?) the ability of centralized
> checking (?).
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jason Day [mailto:jasonday at worldnet.att.net]
> > Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 3:13 PM
> > To: ale at ale.org
> > Subject: Re: [ale] KDE reinstall
> > 
> > 
> > On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 02:03:23PM -0400, Zyman, Andy wrote:
> > > I really appreciate your answers . Main thing for me was to 
> > know that i can
> > > do %) that using rpm. Very helpful was a note about --nodep.
> > 
> > Uninstalling KDE by using --nodeps is just asking for trouble.  In
> > general, you should never, ever, EVER use --nodeps or --force 
> > unless you
> > know exactly what you are doing, and what the consequences are.
> > 
> > > I have been trying to install netscape but it started 
> > asking for whole bunch
> > > of different packages and when i tried to reinstall them it 
> > triggered
> > > dependency n other and so on so on. so i finally gave up. 
> > and moved to lower
> > > version of browser.
> > 
> > Welcome to [dll|rpm|dependency] hell.  This is the main 
> > reason I stopped
> > using RedHat and started using Debian, then Gentoo.  I have heard that
> > apt4rpm is very good, but my understanding is that you need to start
> > using it with a relatively fresh install.  Others here swear 
> > by SuSE and
> > it's YaST tool, but I've never really used it.  And of course there's
> > RHN and RedCarpet for RedHat.
> > 
> > > I don't quite understand the "dependency" thing.  I 
> > understand that it
> > > basically "this need to be in place so that will work". But 
> > in case of glib
> > > libraries, i can create links and it should ( well, not a 
> > rule of thumb
> > > obviously ) work OK. At the same time if i do remove with 
> > --nodep check,
> > > than how can i find out if all progs will be alive?
> > 
> > Don't remove stuff with --nodep.  Really.  If you don't 
> > understand what
> > it's doing, don't cross your fingers and hope it will work 
> > out.  On the
> > other hand, it can be a good learning experience, as long as you
> > understand that the system can become unusable.  Put your /home
> > directory on a separate partition, so that if you need to 
> > reinstall the
> > OS you can leave your home directories alone.  And, as 
> > always, make good
> > backups, and keep a rescue disk handy.
> > 
> > Also, don't create links to glib libraries, or any other 
> > libraries, for
> > that matter.  The version numbers change for a reason.  Creating a
> > symlink for a different version so that a program will work might seem
> > to work at first, but could lead to hard-to-diagnose errors later.
> > 
> > [ contents of entire fscking thread snipped ]
> > -- 
> > Jason Day                                       jasonday at
> > http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot 
> > att dot net
> >  
> > "Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
> >     -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 

 This is a digitally signed message part