RPM is the hero, not the villan

[Andy Green]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:53:11 -0800
> John Wendel <john.wendel at metnet.navy.mil> wrote:
> 
>> And I have a broken Ubuntu 6.10 box that was caused by updating from a 
>>   non-ubuntu repository. They all suck! It must be a hard problem.
> 
> I have often considered trying gentoo to see if building my own damn
> libs and programs from source would operate better, but I have the feeling
> that would just push the problem out to more esoteric kinds of
> dependency issues like new compilers refusing to build old source.

Yeah: I think a lot of rpm-blaming goes on because it is the guy telling 
you the bad news.  But if there is bad news, it existed without rpm, was 
not caused by rpm, it is in the tarballs the stuff was built from 
anyway.  Maybe they sorted it now but the current inkscape release as of 
last week can't be made for FC6, at least I couldn't make it, and extras 
had the previous release, due to various dependencies on packages I 
spent an evening trying to build from source.

Over time I found that rpm was in fact increasing the amount of sanity 
with the packages, even when it tells me what I don't want to hear, 
because at least it formalized and captured the messy interrelationships 
that in fact already existed.  If rpm tells you there is a problem with 
what you are trying to do to libcom_err before it went ahead and trashed 
it, that's something to be grateful to rpm for, for giving you an 
opportunity to not do the breakage by warning you that you are leaving 
the path of sanity, not somehow blaming it for generating the situation.

-Andy