Package management vs. ./configure

[jiva@devware.com]

It's true that RPMs or DEBs are *not* for the clueless, but they were
never intended to be.  The purpose of RPM or DEB is convenience for
clueful system administrators to be able to easily administer many
machines without having to worry about different software
configurations on them.  Meaning, on any RedHat box, I can do an rpm
-qa | grep -i packagename and find out if that package is installed or 
not.  Yes, you can do similar with locate, but what if you don't know
the filenames that might be included in a particular package?  Or,
what if the filenames are similar enough to a thousand other packages
that you get back 3 MB of results?

RPM also automagically checks for dependant software when you install
an RPM.  It also checks the version of that dependant software.  AND
it also checks it when you UNinstall too.  Ie: what if I am deleting
my gnome software, then I go and run gnorpm, and BOOM it breaks!
Well, RPM would have warned me when I went to uninstall gnome.

Yours is clearly a situation of garbage-in, garbage-out.  Obviously,
if you're not going to use RPMs for everything, you are going to have
RPM complain about things not being installed.  The answer?  Learn how 
to build RPMs for .spec files if you absolutely must have the latest
greatest or a custom build.

On Sat, Jul 08, 2000 at 01:20:58PM -0700, Rod Roark wrote:
> 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.
> 
>    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
> 
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		-- The Animals