Reinstalling as an opportunity

[Donald Allen]

On 9/14/06, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> "Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > You just made my point. RPM deals with the atoms -- you have to assemble
> > them into molecules yourself. Yes, it can be done, but it's more work
> than
> >
> > emerge gnucash
> >
> > or
> >
> > apt-get gnucash
> >
> > and more error-prone, as we've seen in countless messages to this
> mailing
> > list.
>
> Indeed, and "yum install gnucash" has worked since FC1!  You've just
> made MY point.


Interesting that something sent to /dev/null ended up here.

I freely admit that I have no recent personal experience with Redhat or FCn
-- struggling to maintain and upgrade a Redhat 7.3 system was quite enough
for me. But I do read what people have to say about their own more recent
experiences. While I don't doubt what you say about "yum install gnucash",
my reading leads me to the inescapable conclusion that, in general,
Redhat/FC systems are harder to administer because they still mostly get
maintained at the rpm level, because the package repositories yum relies on
aren't nearly as rich as Debian, Ubuntu, or Gentoo (see

http://toykeeper.net/soapbox/debian-redhat/

for an example of what I'm talking about; yes, it's 10 months old -- has the
situation changed much?). Yes, it's possible to avoid trouble with rpms if
you really know what you are doing. But it's more work, most folks don't
know what they're doing in this regard (nor should they have to, given the
present state of the art), and they end up in rpm/dependency hell.

I concede your point that gnucash is not an example of this (on an FC
system), but my general point stands: in my opinion, Red Hat and its
relatives are  behind the times in package management and I, for one, would
not subject myself to the pain of maintaining such a system when such good
alternatives exist, free.

/Don



-derek
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                         PGP key available
>