On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 02:11:08PM -0600, Daniel Taylor wrote: > The way the software packages are put together. Not as in plastic and > cardboard, but the .deb or .rpm files themselves. Sorry, you missed the sarcasm, please give an example of what is superior about the debian package management system as compared to RPM. > >*Please* will someone explain this dependencies issue? People like to > >spout 'dependancy hell', 'dependency consistency' etc. without ever > >providing any meat. It's like a marketing buzzword. > > > I forget that there are relative newbies present, sorry. Ouch, was that an insult? > Get something in the wrong order and your > whole installation can end up horked while you have to sort things out > by hand. rpm doesn't allow you to do this, you would have to use --force and/or --nodeps. At this point you're on your own, and have no right to complain. > > There are two parts to dependency management: > 1. How good packages are about listing their key dependencies. In my > experience .deb packages are better in this. I don't know why, as > there is no technical reason why they should be. If foo needs bar, it needs it. Case closed. I see no reason why .deb should be better than .rpm at saying 'i need BAR' > 2. How good the package manager is about handling packages in dependency > order. dselect+apt rocks in this area, though the UI is not what I > would call endearing. Most of the "nice" package management frontends > come up short in this area for me. and apt4rpm does it just as well (if not better) -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list