alan c wrote:
> I have heard several independent generally adverse remarks about RPM, 
> and would be grateful to know some background.
>
> I use/d suse ok, which I know uses rpms, and now k/ubuntu, which I 
> know is deb based. Comments even go as far as
> 'RPM hell' - what does rpm do that is unwanted?
In the bad old days of just using the rpm command, there would be times 
when you installed or removed an RPM package and it would fail saying 
other packages  require/depend on the RPM. It could become RPM-hell if 
you didn't understand who to get around this. Since then the RPM command 
has had many improvements to help around this with new command line 
argument. The biggest change was moving to yum, which like apt, sorts 
out all the dependencies for you. It still requires good package 
management to list the dependencies, but the same applies in apt. I 
haven't had any problems with yum or pup in Fedora and Red Hat (RHEL).
The ones you hear complaining suffered RPM-hell many years ago and moved 
to non-RPM systems. It really isn't a problem anymore.
John.
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