[olug] sparking a flame war.....

[Mark]

David Walker wrote:
> rpms have always worked well for me
> I have been using portage for 2 days now on one machine and it seems very easy 
> to use.  I am concerned though that I will be installing a lot of things I 
> don't mean to when they show up as a dependency.
> 
> The "nice" thing about rpm hell is that you always know what packages you are 
> installing on your machine because you are the one making the decision to 
> install it.

The hard thing may be finding the many packages that you need and installing them without breaking other things.

I think the real problem with RPMs (and most other packaging systems) is when you want to install program X which requires package A2. However an earlier version of that package (A1) is already installed and used by other programs on your machine. Now, you may find that upgrading to A2 BREAKS the existing packages to get X to work. Or you will have a problem installing the package in the first place.

I don't think you run into problems if you stick with distribution supported packages. However, if you want to try out leading-edge stuff you may get into the newer stuff that your distro doesn't support yet. That's the type of situation I have encountered before.

As an example I suggest "GNUCash". About a year or more ago they had a new version that used a BUNCH of other libraries for graphing, etc. These packages were also new things in GNOME 2.0 (not yet officially released). Attempts to install it would fail miserably and could break GNOME as well. So the GNUCash official recommendation was something like "Don't try to install it. Wait for your distribution to include it." 

If you stick with the tried and true basic system then you are okay. However, if you start to stray out into the 'new' and 'under development' stuff then you're likely to encounter the problem.

There is a lot to be said for the ease of a windows setup. While the same situation I presented can still happen on windows, it has only happened to me once and it was easily resolved.

-Mark E.