RPM Distros Upgradable??

[jdm64]

I have mostly used Deb and Portage based Distros. I found this article on DistroWatch giving a slight warning about RPM and RPM Distros.

[abaelinor]

no

[atrus123]

The first disto I ever used was Fedora. The whole RPM thing was simply the way things were done, and it seemed fairly Windows-like and easy to use. That said, I could never figure out what went wrong when something went wrong. I felt sort of blind to the OS. I'm still not entirely sure how to upgrade the system beyond just reinstalling it.

When I finally gave up on Fedora and installed Ubuntu, I was amazed at just how easy and transparent things were. And when it's time to move to Breezy, I need only change the repositories and upgrade. Easy as pie.

I wouldn't use a RPM based distro. You might as well just use Windows. But I guess, if you insist on it, maybe SuSE. YAST (or whatever their package manager is called) seems to work better than anything I found in Fedora or Mandrake.

J.
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[Shadow Skill]

[codergeek42]

[bos_mindwarp]

I would say that redhat/suse/mandrake/fedora do small incremental updates fairly well, usually security updates and such. Problem arises when something radical changes in a certain package, or when changes happen to layout of the stuff.

It is not so hard to replace one binary/lib with another, the problem is the configuration files and interoperability between packages of different versions. For me portage and 'etc-update' works better.

[numerodix]

[asiobob]

As mentioned it's not the RPM problem but rather what manages it.

In very broad terms an rpm package and ebuild are similiar as is Yum and Portage. Again I stress that was in broad terms.
Portage does the updating just as Yum does updaing using RPM. The problem is how good is portage, how good is yum, how good is "what ever package manager".

Say you have a desktop gentoo install, you have gnome, a ton of apps, then for the next year you use all these and at no stage do you run an emerge world. An year has passed and you do a emerge world -uDva

There is a good chance you find yourself in a mess, a mess that you can deal with but if you don't you could be in well..a mess.
There could be Gentoo profile updates, Gnome probably uses things in the new kernel, the new kernel is several versions a head, devfs is removed and you need to use udev. You see you can solve these problems but it could be that there's just to many at one go. Then there's the etc update.

My point is upgrading from say fc2 to fc3 is like updating gentoo once in a blue moon.

[predatorfreak]

[jdm64]

So, it looks like the 2002 DistroWatch Article about RPM Distros is still true today. A complete Distro upgrade of a RPM distro is still not recomended / even workable. Unlike Deb and Portage based Distros, that are more suited for massive upgrades, RPM Distros seem to be good for minor upgrades. This problem seems not to be a flaw in RPM itself, but in the front-end tools used to manage RPM, and the incorrect way that RPM Distros are using RPM to manage the software.

For this reason I have steerd away from RPM Distros. And also because almost every RPM Distro makes there own .rpm files for their Distro, that are sometimes incompatable with other RPM Distros. So if I installed Fedora Core, I most likely couldn't use SUSE .rpms. This again is not a flaw in RPM, but in the disunity of RPM Distros not doing things in a standard way. From what I've seen Deb Distros are more unified. As a .deb file will most likely (not always) work with any Deb based Distro.

[bos_mindwarp]

I think that good reason gentoo package management works better for me has to do with the fact that when I install my system, I start from barebones, adding packages with options and features (USE-flags) as I need them. Then when it is time to update stuff, or even manually hack config files, I have better idea of what exists on my machine and why. If, say, quicktime is broken, I can always rebuild mplayer without it, until things are functional again. Or rebuild it against older version of quicktime.

That level of granularity is hard to achieve on your redhat/suse/whatever, or at least, it was for me. You'd update something and get a bunch of rpms you never wanted, without them stuff will not work, and with them, something else might get broken.

[slycordinator]

[curtis119]

I was a diehard Slackware user for 10 years or so and had the same problems. You can't really upgrade a running Slack system. You have to backup the config data, wipe the disk and reinstall. One of the only bad things about Slack IMHO.
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[feld]

can anyone tell me why every rpm distro i've ever used on every machine i've tried seems to lock up when u go to upgrade? its stupid.


at school there is a linux class which i of course am not taking. why would I? the teacher only knows Fedora. Well, the GUI at least. had to come ask me the other day how to change your default gateway from the CLI....

even she tells the students NOT to update because it locks up the update program lol


why, oh why?


-Feld
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[jdm64]

[playfool]

[curtis119]