Vicious Circle of Package Dependencies

[Stuart Sears]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 06:34, Paul Batt wrote:
> Hello
> I have exactly the same problem. I want to install Quanta and things like
> perl Tk or python Tkinter on Red Hat Enterprise WS. To me it's an unanswered
> basic question if you are supposed to install programs via rpm on Red Hat
> distributions or if it is ok to use standard tar-Packages. I did the latter
> with Tcl/Tk and it seems to be in order. I have the impression that rpm only
> works if you find a package wich is sort of Red Hat approved for your
> specific distribution. For all other stuff .tar is better. Is that correct?
nope.
BTW please bottom, rather than top-post to this list... :-)
rpm will vlaintly attempt to install any .rpm package you throw at it -
the advantage to using rpm is that it does package _management_ rather
than just installation - it will allow you to find out which version of
a particular package you have installed and even which package installed
a particular file, and also allows you toupgrade and remove old packages
-tarballs make this harder (although there are package management tools
available for them) as, among other things, they do not chekc if you
already have certain files on your system before they replace them.
Most of the packages you will be looking for will probably be available
from
http://freshrpms.net
or
http://dag.wieers.com

if it is dependency management you're looking for then you could do far
worse than apt4rpm (available from dag above)
install it, type
	apt-get update
so that it can update its package lists
	apt-cache search <packagename or keyword>
will let you know which packages are available. 
	apt-get install <packagename>
will download and install a package _and_ its dependencies using rpm, so
that you can remove them later if need be.

Regards

Stuart
--
Stuart Sears RHCE, RHCX