I agree, package managers are certainly not for the clueless.  The
problem comes when the available package is broken or obsolete.

What inpsires me to post this message is a very recent experience with
the mod_php3 and mod_php3-ldap RPMs that come with Mandrake.  I had to
uninstall both of these and install PHP3 from source because the
Mandrake RPMs just didn't work when trying to use LDAP.

Now of course any RPM I later install that requires PHP will complain
because its RPM is not installed, and so I'll have to do something
special about that.

Note that I'm not gratuitously living on the bleeding edge.  I just
wanted LDAP to work.

The moral?  There needs to be a better way.

-- Rod
   http://www.sunsetsystems.com/

On Sat, 08 Jul 2000, you wrote:
> In a recent post, someone hinted that package
> management was for the clueless.  I don't feel
> that this is the case.  Package management and
> "./configure; make; make install" are simply
> two separate beasts.
> 
> The autoconfigure stuff was created because of
> the differences in OSes, the location of
> header files, existence of function calls,
> function call parameters, and so on.
> 
> Package management is an attempt to solve
>   - What files are associated with each other?
>   - Have any files gone missing?
>   - For this package to function, what other
>     packages (or services) are required?
>   - Where the Hell did THAT file come from?
>   - How's the integrity (file ownership,
>     modes, contents) of my system?
>   - Are all of the systems I admin running
>     the same version of a given package?
> 
> Yes, a system created with a series of
> "./configure; make install" (or Slackware's
> untar this tarball) will run.  Usually, though,
> these systems end up with a LOT of cruft and
> generally over time become a mixed bag of sh*t.
> 
> For the Linux systems that I admin, I have a
> simple rule.  If an .rpm or .deb is available,
> use it.  If not, or if I need the latest version
> out of a CVS repository, or if I have a requirement
> to highly customize something (like Apache), only
> then will I fall back to the "./configure"
> (or cc -o foo foo.c; mv foo /usr/local/bin)
> method and *document*.  If I were managing LOTS of
> systems, I might take the time to create my own
> customized packages.  As it is, the package manager
> takes care of 99.9% of the files on my systems.
> I can track the others manually.  Is it because
> I'm clueless?  I don't think so.  It's because I'm
> lazy and ambivalent.  I really don't care to
> manually track the latest "ls" and "vim"
> developments.
> 
> FWIW, I've used several *nix package managers--
> SYSV, AIX installp, (Free|Open)BSD, rpm.  installp
> is EXTREMELY thorough, but Debian's .deb and apt
> system wins, hands down.
> 
> 
> D