ATrpms and FC5/RHEL5

[Florin Andrei]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 14:10 +0800, Jeff Pitman wrote:
> On 1/2/06, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org> wrote:

> > It's the repositories hell, the vengeful progeny of the near-deceased
> > RPM dependencies hell.
> 
> Not really. If it's "hell", don't use them. Pretty simple.

Right, so repository XYZ carries the package ABC, which I need, but
since XYZ fosters the repo hell, I shall simply walk away whistling.

Makes no sense to me, really. The concept of package repositories is a
very powerful one, but this current situation is crippling.

Fedora per se, plus Extras, is nice, solid and coherent.
Fedora plus the repositories ecosystem is currently an entity with a
serious multiple personality disorder.

> And the situation is not synonymous with rpm dep hell, because with
> apt/yum/smart you don't have to install a random rpm and then download
> thirty other random rpms to satisfy deps.

I didn't say it's synonymous. But it can be equally frustrating. Or
more. Such as, enable repo XYZ, do a "yum update", get a broken system
("broken" as in "does not work anymore with any other repo, and XYZ must
be perpetually used from now on otherwise funky things happen"). Do not
pass Go, do not collect $200.

> The issue is whether Core/Extras should protect base. Most of the 3rd
> party repo people have chimed in with a unanimous thumb down.

3rd party repos have no business fiddling with the core packages, since
that is the root cause of the repo hell. It boggles the mind that this
is not a self-evident truth.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/