On 2009-06-30, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> wrote: > In message <td22m.1717$8r....@nlpi064.nbdc.sbc.com>, Tim Harig wrote: >> On 2009-06-29, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> >> wrote: >>> Sounds more like broken OS with no integrated package management. >> Package managers with dependency tracking were all the rage when I first >> started using Linux. So I tried Red Hat and everything worked great until >> the depency database corrupted itself. > I have been using and administering various flavours of Linux--Red Hat, > SuSE, Mandrake (before it was Mandriva), Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu--over about > the last decade, and I have NEVER seen this mythical dependency database > corruption of which you speak.
Its usually referred to as RPM hell (like DLL hell) although it can happen to DEB packages as well. You end up in a situation with cyclic dependencies where you cannot delete one application because it depends on a second but you cannot remove the second because it depends on the first. What can I say. It happens. It happened to me. > If you thought they were "all the rage" before, they're pretty much > mandatory now. I have been happy for years using my own heavily modified version of Slackware for installing the base system. After that, I install everything from source. Incidently, a similar discussion has started in a subthread of comp.unix.shell. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
