[ale] Upgrading to Apache 2 on RH 7.3

[Dylan Northrup]

A long time ago, (15.09.03), in a galaxy far, far away, Howard Fore wrote:

:=On Monday, Sep 15, 2003, at 15:55 US/Eastern, Jim Lynch wrote:
:=
:=> You've just discovered why I'll never install Red Hat on any system I 
:=> own or maintain.  If you gotta have RPM, go to Suse.  Otherwise Debian 
:=> has a much more civil method of handling dependencies.  There appears 
:=> to be a port of apt-get to RH.  That might help, but then again, I 
:=> suspect when you're through you'll have installed most of RH 9....
:=
:=(If I had a choice I'd run Debian myself, not my choice or something I 
:=can change. Just playing the cards I'm dealt.)
:=
:=I had the same issues with SuSE, hence my preference for Debian. It 
:=seems a fatal flaw of rpm as a path of system maintenance to not be 
:=able to gracefully (and at least semi-automatically) handle 
:=dependencies.

RPM handles dependencies just fine.  The problem is package maintainers
putting in hard dependencies or coders not maintaining backwards
compatibility and saying "You've got to have libfoo 2.2.5a7 or greater, but
not greater than libfoo 2.2.6."  When there's nobody riding herd on the
cats, they put whatever they want into the code which leads to the crazy rpm
dependency tree that everybody knows and hates.

Personally I prefer the BSD ports method where I actually build the source
and can specify whether to define specific options when I build thereby
picking what dependency path I want to go down.  The fact I can build
packages from the source also means I can have a build server, make the
packages, push to testing, see how it works, then push to production servers
which have all been built using this methodology and which should all have
identical package kits on them (for each defined service they perform).  I
also have the source code for all the packages I've installed in
/usr/ports/distfiles and in /usr/ports/<port section>/<port name>/work

And the reason it all works is because of oversight and testing by the BSD
Ports maintainers (which may or may not be the people actually maintaining
the actual source code).  They insure everything works, verify dependencies
and create patches for BSD specific issues.  Sometimes the Cathedral works
better than the Bazaar.

-- 
Dylan Northrup <*> docx at io.com <*> http://www.io.com/~docx/
"Harder to work, harder to strive, hard to be glad to be alive, but it's 
 really worth it if you give it a try." -- Cowboy Mouth, 'Easy'