Package management

[Donald Allen]

I'd like to gently suggest to the many people who have written to this forum
describing various forms of dependency hell they've gotten themselves into
that there are modern package management systems offered by Debian, Ubuntu,
Gentoo, and, reputedly, Redhat (I have no experience with yum, but I'm told
it's a huge improvement over trying to maintain a Redhat system at the rpm
level). It's just not necessary to get yourself into this kind of trouble.
Yes, instant gratification can be the motivation, as the latest gnucash
isn't immediately made available by many distributions (I once built gnucash
manually from source on a Debian system for this reason -- it took me the
better part of a day to get it right; never again!). But this is not a
problem with a distribution such as Gentoo, which makes new versions
available quickly, albeit in the 'testing' state.

/Don Allen