I tried several Ubuntu versions in my VMware a little and had run into
some problem installing some packages. I claim that I am both very
experienced (in RPM-based area) and a novice (in DEB-based area). Yes,
RPM system has its many problems but I can get by most of them. I have
also created many RPMs using my own spec files. Bear in mind that RPM
system (and I believe this holds for any other systems such as DEB-based
or Gentoo as well) is only as good as the one who wrote the spec file.
A badly written spec file can screw up many things either causing lots
of unnecessary dependencies, installing files to the wrong location, or
having incorrect assumption in their post-installation script(s), etc.
I have run into similar situations with efile in Gentoo, too. In my
limited experience with Synaptic, there are situations that it could not
resolve dependency. This situation is especially bad in RPM-based
system as there are so many different repositories (such as rpmfind,
rpmforge, epel, etc.) that use theirs on assumption/rpms that it's
almost impossible to download from one repository and install on your
system without running into some issue (such as you use rpmforge as your
main non-vendor repository and need to install an rpm that's not
available in rpmforge but are in epel's.) So to be fair, RPM-based
system is not perfect but I am pretty comfortable using it in my daily
job. :-)
Cheers,
Shing-Shong
> Anyone that has only used an RPM-based distribution should really try a
> DEB-based distribution at some point. -- Just to see some of the other
> options.
>
> I've heard a bunch of the Redhat Engineers jumped boat and formed
> Foresight Linux: http://www.foresightlinux.org/ I've not used it
> myself, but I do know it uses a package management system that is a
> full generation beyond the (good) package management systems in other
> distributions.
>
> When I try to use RPM-based distributions, I almost always come away
> wondering just exactly who the competition of the product was supposed
> to be.
>
> I mean, with any DEB-based distribution when you install a package it
> will (1) use sane defaults, or (2) ask just enough questions. This
> results in packages that always work when installed.
>
> My experience is that RPM-based systems do not ask questions even when
> they really need to.
>
> Plus you have the whole upgrading thing... DEB-based distributions
> have had in-place upgrades from one major version to the next for 15+
> years. Even current Fedora releases "highly recommend" you perform fresh
> installs instead of in-place upgrades.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
>
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