Re: [Pan-users] Upgrading to Pan v0.12.0 on Red Hat Linux 7.1 issues

[Jeff Vian]

Everyone has an opinion. Some are good and some are bad, but most stink 
when forced on others.

As the author at the site you referenced noted, MOST rpm users have 
flawless usage results. A few don't. Most of the failures, if the entire 
truth were known, likely fail to use the informative messages and update 
everything at once, or they use --nodeps and break something then have 
to go back and fix things or start over from scratch.

This thread is an example of bad choices that caused problems, but with 
a little bit of information from others the problem was solved.  The 
dependencies caused the problems, but eliminated many others that would 
have been seen by incompatible software packages.

The one thing I see that most often contributes to an inability to 
install/use the upgrades is that the user does not understand or use the 
info he sees in the messages related to the failure, or they force the 
error to be ignored and then wonder why the install does not work.

The reason for the dependencies, as has been seen often in the 
development of Pan, is that new development takes advantage of 
improvements in other packages as well. Thus everything is in flux and 
constantly changing. Dependencies ensure that the packages used in 
development are also used when the package is in use. Thus the package, 
once installed, works as the developer intended.

Windows handles this with a message (sometimes) usually in the printed 
documentation on the box the package came in, that certain things are 
required.

If you are unable to understand the changes and be flexible enough to 
follow them, I suggest that you may get a release that works for you and 
stick with it and never update. This will eliminate the need for you to 
think, plan, and be inovative in doing the updates. I suggest that you 
think for yourself and not take the words of others as gospel and spread 
their mis-information as fact.

If you are not willing to be flexible maybe you should stick with 
Windows where backward compatibility constantly contributes to code 
bloat and inhibits new development.

If, on the other hand, you educate yourself (as most who use these 
newsgroups do) you can find out what the problem is and fix it. Thus 
having the ability to enjoy the leading edge of software packages and 
educating yourself at the same time.


mdew wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 04:17, Toby Inkster wrote:
>
> > On 23 Jun 2002 01:51:00 +1200
> > mdew <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > | only on Ximian supported platforms... i laugh at people who have alot
> > | dependancy problems installing any package including pan/pan-cvs, its
> > | non-exisistant on debian :) no more --force --nodeps.
> >
> > RPM, as a packaging format has no significant advantages or disadvantages over 
> > DEB (except that RPMs are in general more widely available and that RPM has 
> > been adopted as the standard packaging format for the LSB).
> >
> > As far as the packiaging software is concerned, of course "apt-get" is more advanced than "rpm"... but you 
> > shouldn't try to compare them. Instead compare "dpkg" with "rpm" and you'll see that "rpm" compares 
> > favourably.
> >
> > Compare "apt-get" with "apt-rpm" or Mandrake's "urpmi" and you'll see that RPM 
> > is not as behind as a lot of people claim.
>
>
> you need to re-look at,
> http://www.distrowatch.com/article-rpm.php