RE: FC5 - T3 - Had enough. Package Managers, Yumex is crap.



Tim:
In the past I'd found that whatever method was involved, trying to
install/update a huge number of packages would stress things out too
much.

Steffen Kluge:
Before upgrading from one release to another I usually do this:
* Run "yum list extras" to find any packages that didn't come out
of my chosen set of repos. These are likely to throw up
dependencies that can't be resolved from my repos once on the
new release. I remove them prior to upgrade and reinstall
afterwards.
* Run "yum update yum". Newer versions of yum are typically more
capable and efficient than older ones and could save some
time/grief.

Doing this, I've always succeeded (with minimal fuss) upgrading from
release to release using yum.

I've only twice tried updating a system from one version to another.
The first time showed me it was an utter disaster. The second time
showed me that things hadn't improved since the first time.

I don't try that any more, and I was only talking about what's involved
with a fresh installation. Say FC4, where you install it new, then
update the packages that go with it.

There must be a lot of computations to determine all the
dependencies, something that is a major bugbear in Linux that I've not
had to deal with in other OSs - too many interdependencies.

I think this is because of any combination of the following reasons:
* other OSes don't check dependencies
* other OSes come with a tiny set of software compared to FC
* on other OSes dependencies are checked by app installers at
install time, later removal or changing of required stuff goes
unnoticed until the app mysteriously crashes
* on FC, package maintainers make mistakes in specifying
dependencies, or go over-zealous with dependencies (specify
something that's not actually required)

Taking other OSs into account, I don't see any that have one program
dependent on some other 15 meg package, that's dependent on some other
15 meg package, that's dependent on some 140 megs of other packages...
About the only huge dependency is on the blighted MSIE, and thankfully
that seems less common these days (.NET only seems needed by obscure
little toys, not real applications).

The old DLL hell is nothing compared to RPM hell, and the old DLL hell
is almost non-existent, now. It's quite rare to come across some
program needing some obscure file, unless you're playing with
experiments. Most software comes with what it needs, complete.

The idea of common libraries is good in theory, with one common library
for some function (e.g. a standardised file requester) being used by all
applications. But in practice it's another matter. Linux seems to have
nearly circular dependencies, and many of them are huge packages. I
don't use Mozilla, but it has to be there because other things want it.
If some exploit is found in Firefox, I have to update more than just
Firefox, the same exploit needs repairing in Mozilla, and then the other
programs dependent on that often need updating.

Try updating Gnome or KDE, for instance, and you're in for grief.

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