I have to admit. I was almost starting to think that RPM-based distro’s is perhaps not the worst thing ever. I was wrong. They are. 3:20 gives new meaning to the phrase “rpm hell”.
Where a simple “yum upgrade” can leave your box in a totally unusable state. No, I kid you not.
I’m probably making a 70km out to client and 70km back in the morning due to this fact. Better make sure I’ve got the flippen LiveCDs. Now, once I’ve re-installed, I need to install a package that doesn’t come with the standard installation, which means means I’ve first got to yum upgrade/update – not only risking the same crap again, but also causing me to have to re-download approx 300MB worth of stuff I’ve already downloaded in the last 10 hours.
Give me a Gentoo, or even Debian box any day.
I have no idea what causes the problems I experience with rpm every single time I touch it, but it’s getting to be a bad habit. Almost every time there is something new. The question I want to ask is why, oh why have I never had these issues with Debian? And extremely seldom with Gentoo. And when I’ve had these issues, I was always able to resolve it in a few seconds (minutes at the extreme), but I’ve been sitting for five and a half hours now with the CentOS box.
And the only thing google is providing is downloads for the missing package – WTF SHOULD I NEED TO DOWNLOAD A .rpm THAT MOST LIKELY ISN’T EVEN COMPILED FOR THE SPECIFIC DISTRO I’M INSTALLING IT INTO WHEN THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE “KNOWN GOOD” PACKAGE REPOSITORIES FOR THE DISTRO?!?
It just does not make any kind of sense. No, I’ll be keeping my Gentoo habits for at least a while longer. And Debian where I can’t use Gentoo.
UPDATE: The folks in #centos on irc.freenode.org rocks. Thanks folks. You guys really helped a lot.
RPM based distro “mandriva” allowed me to unistall a very important KDE component (without even a warning) which left me with nothing but a black screen when I restared my PC:( what a pain!
To kill a unix machine is as easy as “rm -rf /”(and Ubuntu users don’t forget sudo when you test the command) but when the OS is helping you on your quest of destruction… I will be wary of RPM based machines.
And Gam3 not to be rude. But if you knew that it was a “very important KDE component” why did you uninstall it… And if a black screen was all you get. I can bet you removed something more that a important component of KDE.
By that I never used a RPM distro, KDE GUI more than a few hours.
I am a happy Gentoo/Ubuntu User.
I can fix a Gentoo/Ubuntu machine as fast as I can break it. (Sometimes 😀 )
Well i think you chose the correct title “rpm and me” Thousands of people including myself have been using rpm based systems for years without all this drama you have.
Yes. But I’ve also heard of quite a number of people who had even more drama than myself. Perhaps I’m just prejudice (in fact, I am, now), perhaps I don’t understand it. The point being that I’ve used rpm (yum/drakconf/yast – grouped together) considerably less than either dpkg (apt/synaptic) and portage and the headaches that it has caused is considerably more than the others combined (even if I group ipkg in with dpkg/portage). Of the RPM based ones mandriva is probably the one I had the most joy with. So congrats to the Mandriva devs. However, I will stay as far as humanly possible away from most of the other RPM based distro’s. That’s just me though. I’m not your average user – which may well be a huge part of the problem.
My opinion on package managers is simple: They should inform me if my change is going to hose (make unbootable or otherwise seriously damage my system), but allow me to proceed if I insist, further more it must do nothing more, nor less, than that which I request.