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.