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Gentoo Linux Rethinks Package Management System
YOU ARE SO FIRED! writes "In an effort to conform to the LSB standards, Gentoo Linux will be adopting RPM as the standard form of package management in portage 2.1. More information can be found in the Gentoo weekly newsletter. I'd surely be fired if I would've proposed such an idea!"
I was pissed.. Until I realized the GWN is dated April 1.. Haha... damn.. had me for a few seconds there.. Bastards! :)
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
well, it isn't so much RPM that sucks as a tool in itself as it is braindead package authors (well, it is kind of non-unixy in the small tool that does one thing kind of philosophy, rpm is a huge monolithic program). So you try to install lynx and find perl is a dependency. wha? ok, so you install perl. You don't really have space for it on this box, but hey, maybe it will come in handy. But the perl rpm says a dozen or so perl modules are dependencies. huh? Those damn things are optional, goddammit. But whatever. So perl is happy. Back to wget. Now it says it has to install index.html. WTF? A fucking homepage? That's a damn dependency? awright, let it continue, and now it bitches cause index.html is generated by python.
That's the problem with RPM systems. You want to install a text-only browser on a 486 and wind up installing 100 megs more vthan you wanted to.
Some software comes only in RPM packages, like Compaq's C compiler. Ever tried to install an rpm on a Slackware system? It complains that glibc, bin/sh and a kernel aren't installed. RPM is stupid.
I've patched my rpm to take --just-do-it-you-goddam-piece-of-shit as an argument, which sets the --force and --nodep bits.