[H-GEN] SMALL RPM PROBLEM

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Tue Feb 11 23:07:44 EST 2003


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

Robert Kearey wrote:

| "Words to the effect" doesn't mean much - what you probably did was
| something like this:
| 
| rpm -Uvh foo.i386.rpm
| 
| [oops, I want to uninstall]
| 
| rpm -e foo.i386.rpm
| error: package foo.i386.rpm is not installed
| 
| rpm -e foo is what you want.

This is a perfect example of the glaring faults that infest most
of the package management systems out there.  If you have to use
a different name to uninstall the thing from the name you used
to install it, then the tool you're condemned to use is just
broken.  (This afflicts the FreeBSD packages as well, it's not
just a Linux thing.)

The other area of great suckage is seen when somebody installs
foo-1.2 and then installs foo-1.3 and then decides to uninstall
foo-1.2 and all sorts of really unintuitive stuff happens.  Of
course, it's not easy to get package managers right (or else
they would all work properly all the time), but the end result
is that it is often true that it's good to use packages for some
of the software you want to install and not for other software.
Learning which is which is a painful and tedious process.

Greg

--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.  See http://www.humbug.org.au/



More information about the General mailing list