rpm ranking

[TGAM123]

Hi!What do you think of rpms?i think that installation from rpm is quite s*t*u*p*i*d because there are lots of things missing...i prefer source installation.What do YOU think about RPMS?

[peter]

If you stick to RPMs from your distro's main repository and they match the version number of your distro then RPMs work well. Dependencies with RPMs can be overcome by running rpm --aid in a directory with all the distro's RPMs. Online updaters like YUM also work well by automatically installing the dependencies RPMs.

Building from source can help to overcome the dependencies, but you sometimes have to recompile whenever you upgrade a dependent RPM. This can be problematic in a business environment where you have to test all the dependencies beforehand. With standard packages the headache of regression testing is much less.

It really depends on your needs.

[TGAM123]

thanks for comment

[jro]

I ran Mandrake for years, and I thought the dependencies were handles relatively well. That is, until I moved to DEB's, and I haven't looked back since. I tried installing totally from source too, and that was a nightmare. I had to keep track of all versions and it got out of hand very quickly.

[TGAM123]

thanks for good comment

[beezlebubsbum]

agreed Jro, its so hard to go back after .deb. I used to use Red Hat 6, then Mandrake (which is now Mandriva), but after trying Knoppix, I grew to really love DEBs. A few years back, the idea of installing software on Linux was crazy hard, dependency hell. Nowadays, things like apt-get really make life easy!