Fedora without RPM?

[Les Mikesell]

Isaac Serafino wrote:

>>> Serious dependency trouble and bloatware. Does Fedora have anything to
>>> prevent that, like apt, urpmi, or portage?
>>
>> You not making sense.
>>  - what serious dependency troubles are you having?
> 
> In the past, I ran into too many dependencies, cyclical dependencies,
> and other problems. For an over-simplified example, package B requires
> package A, which requires package B. More complicated problems can
> include package contents, maybe like file A conflicts with library B
> in package C...

RPM is just a messenger here.  The real problem is that you are trying 
to combine components that don't work together, built by people who are 
not coordinating with each other.  All a packaging system can do about 
this is say no.

> RPM wouldn't recognize requirements I actually had installed from
> other RPMs, as contents of other RPMs, or compiled from the source.
> Because I hadn't installed them through RPM or through the "right" RPM
> package (or just because of bugs in RPM's database?,)  RPM still
> thought those were dependencies I didn't have.

This does not happen unless you install packages that were not built 
under your version of fedora or included same-named components that 
weren't the same thing.

> Using "--force" probably just messes things up worse.
> RPM even got broken because of conflicts with all of it's own dependencies.

Not "it's own" dependencies. This happens when you mix 3rd party things 
that aren't in agreement with each other or the base distro.  Just 
because some filename ends in .rpm and your machine has a mechanism to 
install rpms does _not_ mean that the file should be installed there.

> There are even examples of such serious dependency problems with RPM
> in very recent threads from other users in this same mailing list,
> "Yum problem" and "Dependencies missing ??".

Mistakes are always possible regardless of the mechanism.  If this 
happened within the distibution it was corrected.

>>  - what version of Fedora are you using? FC11?
> 
> I'm not currently using Fedora, but I'm trying to find out if it's the
> Linux for me yet. I've used several RPM-based distros, RH 5.2,
> Mandrake 8.1, and Caldera, in the past.

You aren't going to find any disto that lets you mix components that 
were built separately with conflicting requirements (and you won't like 
the results if you get such things installed).  There are, however a 
large number of fedora-compatible rpms available - but probably about 
the same with Ubuntu packages.  Maybe you should run the liveCD versions 
of each and poke around the disto repositories to see if what you want 
is available via yum or synaptic.

>>  - what bloatware?
> 
> I think the RPM-based distributions, RPM dependency chains, and the
> RPM program itself, have what I consider to be excessive hardware
> requirements, as I'm a minimalist on a low budget.

This doesn't make much sense to me.  You should not be running the rpm 
program often enough to care.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com