OT: Gentoo, Red Hat, etc. (was Re: [Mimedefang] Latest MIME-Tools)

[Kelson Vibber]

At 01:28 PM 3/22/2004, Justin wrote:
>RPM is really quite lame.  If you ever want to really annoy RPM uninstall 
>the very dated version of Perl and all it's various modules that come with 
>RH and compile and install the latest greatest from source.  RPM will 
>never forgive you that one. :)

Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried this on Debian?  How well does 
apt-get/dpkg handle that one?

And as I understand it, even in Gentoo you'd still have to use portage to 
get the benefits of its package management.  Sure, it'll be newer than the 
version in Red Hat or Debian Stable, but if you installed from source 
instead of using emerge, you'd still run into problems.

I don't think it's a failing of RPM so much as it's a failing of package 
managers in general - namely, if you install anything that the PM doesn't 
know about, it acts as if it isn't there.  The only way you can get around 
that is if you can override the PM and tell it, "Look, Perl's really 
installed.  I know I can't tell you in detail where all the files are, or 
what libraries and utilities it depends on, but it's installed, honest!"


Kelson Vibber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>