[H-GEN] SMALL RPM PROBLEM

[Robert Kearey]

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Greg Black wrote:

> 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.)

Nonsense. The package name is not the filename - that way of thinking 
leads is the reason people assume .doc files are Word documents. Feh to 
that, and so on.

bash-2.05b$ ls xchat-1.8.11-3.i386.rpm
xchat-1.8.11-3.i386.rpm
bash-2.05b$ rpm -qa | grep xchat
xchat-1.8.11-3
bash-2.05b$ rpm -qp xchat-1.8.11-3.i386.rpm
warning: xchat-1.8.11-3.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 897da07a
xchat-1.8.11-3

(note, there's no key because I built that package myself and haven't 
signed it)

> 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.

Happily, rpm takes care of that by not allowing one to do that. You can 
upgrade an installed package, of course, but you can't have have the 
scenario you describe unless you go nuts with --nodeps and --force, for 
example.

>  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.

I'd agree that some packages are far harder to maintain sanely - 
consider packages PHP webapps for example. I'm the first person to 
mention that RPM has flaws that need addressing, but it's an 
indispensible tool that make my life as a sysadmin much, much easier.

> Greg

-- 
Rob K - Ich mag Chips mit brauner Soße
http://members.optushome.com.au/mammal
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