[PLUG] For The SysAdmin Gurus

[Elliott Mitchell]

>From: plug_0 at robinson-west.com
> On package management being so hyped by people, that's exactly why my
> oldest brother abandoned Debian.  He got overwhelmed by Debian wanting
> to install kde on him.  Being a slackware fan before, he still had 
> problems with dependencies in Debian.  I think he's back to Slackware,
> though he could just be an OSX user.

It was going to install KDE because he wanted a package that requires the
KDE libraries to install. Debian's front ends make it pretty easy to
determine what package(s) depend on those libraries if you want to remove
the libraries. Debian will even listen to you if you get insistant and
tell it to remove libraries and damn the consequences. I have noticed the
situation of all the booby-trap packages that suck in KDE/emacs without
it being obvious, it would be nice to have a
do-not-even-suggest-installing-this-package flag, similar to the "hold"
flag.

The decision is simple, do you go for package management systems which
guarentee (or should guarentee) that all packages will work, but will
suck in packages/libraries you don't want; or do you go for a system
where you manually select all packages to install and can prevent the
installation of undesirable ones, but at the cost of manual dependancies
and possibly broken packages due to forgetting a library? I don't think
it is worth my time handling dependancies fully manually.

> According to the posted interview, Fedora is not bleeding edge.  I've had
> problems more often with CentOs more than I have with Fedora.  Fedora does
> seem to be getting fat though.  Fortunately, the focus now appears to be
> trimming  the fat.  Is there a free up-to-date maximum rpm floating around?

Heh! Fedora *isn't* bleeding edge?! Then what is??? You suggesting
nothing other than Debian-unstable qualifies? (I'd place it beyond, but
oh well)


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