upgrade firefox question

[Ed Wilts]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 01:43:49PM -0400, Michael S. Dunsavage wrote:
> I find that rpm's still have lots of dependacy problems and it's not 
> intelligent enough to go out and resolve them without some 
> intervention.   So a source tarball is still in my favor.

If you don't know what the dependencies are, then a source tarball
doesn't get you any closer to solving the problem.  What you're
essentially doing is a forced rpm install.

rpm was never designed to resolve dependencies but to tell you what they
are.  There are other packages (up2date, yum, apt) that help with
resolving the dependencies but none are perfect.  The problem is hard by
design and there's not a lot we can do about given the limitations of
the OS (other OS's (VMS for example) are much easier to deal with
because of all their intrinsic upwards compatibility.  Executables built
on VMS 20 years ago still run as is.

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program