Women in Technology

Hear us Roar


Article:
  Is Linux Annoying?
Subject:   RedHat Annoyances
Date:   2003-09-12 07:48:53
From:   avdi
I have to agree with previous posters - this is purely a RedHat annoyance (or, really, an annoyance with any RPM-based distro). I remember going through dependency hell back in my Mandrake days - a major part of why I switched to debian. I remember all to well hunting through RPM listings, desperately trying to find combinations which would work, always using --force because there was always some file which conflicted. I've never looked back. People aren't exagerating when they rave about dpkg and apt-get. Unlike RedHat or Mandrake, where only certain packages are packaged officially and the rest have to be hunted down across the internet, Debian's archives have practically every package known to man. And each one is packaged according to Debian policy - which means no file conflicts, no nonstandard file locations, almost no missing Man-pages, and sensible out-of-box configurations. Even for complex mixed stable/testing/unstable systems, judicious use of the /etc/apt/preferences file and a good tool like Aptitude make it easy to arrive at a working mix of packages from various archives and release levels.


As an example of apt's power, when I started with Debian I was using the now-defunct Progeny variant. When I decided to go pure Debian, all I had to do was replace my sources.list lines with the official debian servers and run apt-get dist-upgrade. A few hours later I had a standard debian system, all progeny-specific packages replaced with their debian counterparts. All without breakage or signifigant downtime; all dependencies worked out automatically.

Full Threads Oldest First

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

  • RedHat Annoyances
    2003-11-29 16:45:48  anonymous2 [View]

    I have to agree with previous posters - this is purely a RedHat annoyance (or, really, an annoyance with any RPM-based distro).

    How about apt-rpm?

    http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/
    • RedHat Annoyances
      2003-11-29 16:52:26  anonymous2 [View]

      APT-RPM is a port of Debian's apt tools to RPM based distributions. It was ported by a Brazilian Linux distribution called Conectiva.

      On the other hand, Progeny ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian.

      I'm afraid that most of the "Linux Annoyances" will be fixed before you finish the book. ;-)

Recommended for You
 
Sign up today to receive special discounts,
product alerts, and news from O'Reilly.
Privacy Policy >
View Sample Newsletter >