Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 17:52, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
And more to the point, where third-party RPMs fit into the picture. In RedHat-land they are almost always made to fit into the vendor-provided scheme, clobbering system files if there is a conflict.
It shouldnt do that. RPM packages are supposed to create a .rpmnew file if the preexisting configuration files are modifed. The rules governing such changes are documented in detail in several guides. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/RPM. If packages dont honor such rules then it can be consider a bug with those specific packages rather than RPM itself. Do file bug reports as appropriate.
I'm talking about things that depend on updated/modified versions of stock libraries or other tools like you find in some third-party repositories.
If they're well designed, they should just fit in along with official packages and in every respect be suitable replacements for them.
I'd make exceptions for betaware and the like, such as (maybe) KDE 3.5 or 4.0 before their official release. In such cases, one would wish to have both and choose between them cleanly.