Why some say "rpm hell"

[Beartooth]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 17:01:24 +0000, Tethys wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Greg Woods <woods at ucar.edu> wrote:
> 
>>  [....]so "rpm hell" is largely a thing of the past.
> 
> Sort of. RPM was a victim of its own success. Because Red Hat was the
> leading distribution, it was the one that attracted the largest number
> of third party RPMs, and that's what caused the dependency problems that
> came to be known as RPM hell. Also, people would mix RPMs from Red Hat,
> SuSE and other distributions and just expect them to work (which largely
> they didn't). That problem still exists today, exactly the same as it
> does for dpkg based distributions (and always has done). It's just that
> the RPM and dkpg repositories these days have larger coverage of the
> free software landscape, so the dependencies are more likely to be in
> the default repo, and there are fewer third party packages these days,
> as well as fewer RPM based distributions to muddy the waters.

	It can still happen in another way, to those who use free but 
proprietary apps. 

	Say you want Opera on an old machine that you haven't used for 
some time. You go to a browser it does have, but for some reason the 
default opera.com offers isn't what you want. You find what you do want, 
and opera.com asks whether you want the x86 or the 64-wide version.

	You don't happen to remember which one this machine is, nor an 
easy way to check (like uname -a). So you just download one. 

	Rpm -ivh produces a bramble patch. 

	Being by now an old hand, you notice that all the missing 
dependencies it announces are 64s. So you abort the install, go back to 
opera.com, and get the .rpm for a 32-bit machine. That works, slick as a 
whistle. 

	In this example you have not solved the dependency hell. You have 
dodged it, partly by dumb luck (spotting those 64s), and partly by having 
enough general experience to recognize what they mean.

	A beginner who had gotten into it might easily've worked 
herself through the brambles into an electronic lake of burning brimstone 
before she hollered for help.
-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Not Quite Clueless Power User
Remember I have precious (very precious!) little idea where up is.