[ltp] Distributions

[Buchan Milne]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Harry Mangalam wrote:

> Again, the huge advantage of a Debian system is the ease of installing and
> upgrading.

I haven't had problems upgrading, however I end up doing more clean
installs than upgrades (since I build a lot of RPMs, and need to be
absolutely sure I have no weird packages installed, it's easier that way).

>
> I found that the Mandrake 8.2 system installed well on the a22p and supported
> most of the hardware (except the wireless card and sound) but was a bear to
> install software with all the cascading dependencies

You will have "cascading" dependencies with any package management system.
I just hope you weren't using rpm to isntall pacakges (since
urpmi/rpmdrake etc are intended to be used as a fronted to rpm). I have
installed many many packages, including stuff from the jpackage
(http://www.jpackage.org) and PLF (http://plf.zarb.org) projects, and
never seen problems with this ...

> and once I upgraded the
> Perl subsystem (granted, not via Mandrake's updater, since I needed some
> specific, non-standard options), most of the Mandrake tools broke and I was stuck.

If you need to customise software, you should rather install the SRPM,
do your modifications to the rpm spec file, build a new rpm, and install
that. Otherwise you should have kept your perl installation out of the
system (possible /usr/local).

Messing with an interperter that is used by the majority of the tools in
the distro is probably not a good idea ... just see what happens when you
link /bin/sh to /bin/ash on a Redhat box ... (seems fine, until you
reboot!).

Buchan

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