[PLUG] MS Access Equivalent

[Cliff Wells]

On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 00:06, Paul Johnson wrote:
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> On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:08:16AM -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
> > Well, I haven't used Debian, so perhaps apt performs some magic there
> > that I'm not aware that I'm missing, but having used it for the last
> > year or so on RedHat I haven't had any real problems.  In fact it seems
> > to work better than most of the alternatives.  It might work best on
> > Debian, but I'd hardly categorize it as working "poorly" on RedHat.
> 
> The problem with using any sort of package management on RPM based
> systems is that RPM is utterly broken thanks to multiple distros all
> producing their own versions of the same packages in RPM, none of them
> compatible.  Further complicating things, often times people have a
> tendancy of writing depends on individual files instead of packages,
> and nobody in the RPM world seems to be able to decide just what
> package is supposed to be called what.

I certainly can't argue with this.  It doesn't seem to be rpm that's so
broken as much as the packagers ;)  I usually stick with freshrpms.net
(which includes official RH updates) so as to avoid getting stuff from
all over.  There's also some work between the maintainers of the major
apt repositories for RH to increase compatibility with each other, so
hopefully that will help to set some sort of standard.

> 
> In the .deb world, everybody's debs are compatible with each other's
> distros, you can mix and match without too much hassle.  If you want
> to switch between .deb based distros, no re-installation is
> necissary.  Just change your sources.list to some other distro's
> package servers, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and after
> everything's downloaded, you've changed distros.  

I don't think you'd want to try that in the RPM world ;)  I have used
quite a few Mandrake and Connectiva on RH, but I don't think I'd try to
upgrade to their distro w/o a reinstall ;)

> Depending on
> individual files is (thankfully) not possible, so we don't suffer from
> that sort of stupidity, and everybody just uses the Debian package
> names to prevent the package naming stupidity chronic to RPM.

Got me (or rather, rpm) there too =)

-- 
Cliff Wells, Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726  (800) 735-0555