Package management

[Tom Purl]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 02:36:36AM +0000, Donald Allen wrote:
> 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.
> 

I would have to agree with this statement.  I use Ubuntu, and while
it took me a few hours to properly compile GnuCash from source, I
appear to have had significantly fewer problems than a lot of
RedHat/CentOS users who have posted to this list.  I honestly can't
imagine having to install a complex program like GnuCash by scouring
a bunch RPM sites and hoping that all of the RPM's will all play 
well together.