[ale] RPM/yum/package management

[James P. Kinney III]

On Thu, 2007-08-23 at 19:15 -0400, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
<deleting loads of near drivel I wrote before dinner>
> 
> Here is the summary of my most recent experience with an RPM distribution:
>   * Show up at person's house, take a look at PC.
>   * Guy says "needs to be updated" but he can't do it and he
>     doesn't know why.  Guy is unable to see, and screen reading
>     software kept breaking.
>   * Clicked the update manager in the task tray.
>   * It said X number of updates available, and I clicked "update" or
>     "install" or whatever was there (under a year ago, sorry my memory
>     isn't entirely crisp... Edgy Eft had just been released).
>   * Waited three hours.  The number of updates was somewhere under
>     100, so three hours on a broadband connection for the updates
>     had me frustrated.
>   * Finally, an error shows up that says that a dependency could not
>     be met for one of the core system packages having to do with
>     the X window system or the possibly gnome.  Can't remember what
>     the package complaints were, but I do recall it seeming trivial
>     and thus insane.
>   * Command was suggested to fix it; ran command, command failed.
>   * Update tool left networking in an inconsistent state and seemed
>     to have removed some software, too.  Big no-no.
>   * 25 minutes later, Ubuntu Edgy Eft found its way onto the system.
>   * The only software on said system that was not from repo was
>     built from source and installed in /usr/local (I did ask the
>     user about this one at the time, hoping for a lead).

This is an issue with a few repos out there that are known to have
compatibility issues with the main distro(s) release. For future
reference the yum repo listing is in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and they can be
turned off by editing the file foo.repo and setting enabled=0. By
narrowing down the repo list, you narrow down the requirements list and
thus the opportunity for problems.

Or using a tool like yumex, which is more complete (IMHO) gui wrapper
that pirut, it is easy to activate and deactivate repos (and deselect
packages with dependency issues.). A big factor I see often is a package
is updated and built using a lib that i also going to be updated. But
for reasons I don't follow, the lib package is NOT also put up on the
repo server (or the sync isn't finished yet).
> 
> I have said exhausted everything that I can say on my knowledge and
> experiences with RPM, however, so I am definitely finished with this thread.
> 
> And while the problem might not be the rpm or yum software directly
> (e.g., the problem could be in the complexity of the repositories
> required, if they are indeed complex and not
> self-checking/self-building), or the problem could really be many
> different problems, the same symptoms have cropped up over time and time
> again.  I don't---and never have---experienced such symptoms on Debian
> and Debian-derived systems, which is precisely why I am such a fan of them.

It is hard enough to get a business entrenched with that stinking dog
pile from Redmond to look at Linux as a viable alternative. If debian
was findable on NASDAQ it would help. So far RHT shows up and so does
NOVL and that makes what I do much easier.
> 
> 	-- Mike
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
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
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