anyone have/tried Mandriva 2005?

[Michael Hipp]

Net Llama! wrote:
> On 05/14/2005 04:35 AM, David Bandel wrote:

>> Because Debian derivatives are so much easier to maintain (no RPM
>> dependency hell), never require reinstalls on "upgrades" (which are
>> continuous anyway), and with over 18,000 packages, building from
>> source is rare.  And the Debian packages just work together and rarely
>> have bugs (they're rather anal about that).
>>
>> The above has been the norm for many years.
> 
> 
> Funny, i've never run into any RPM dependency hell, EVER, even back in 
> the Caldera days.  I'd consider building from source to a positive, not 
> a negative, and RH/Fedora has never required reinstalling to upgrade. 
> Overall, your list sounds like a lot of FUD.

I don't think David is spreading FUD, but neither is it quite as bad as 
it once was. Here is what I found to be repeatably true (*before* RH9):

- Outside of what shipped on the disks, there was little s/w available 
for RH systems in RPM form (that worked, anyway).
- Attempting to install an RPM that did not come on the RH disks almost 
always had "unmeetable" dependencies.
- When it had an unmet dependency it give useless information like 
"missing lib.so.6.3-546.38.99" rather than "this package depends on this 
other package". The latter is solvable, the former isn't.
- Attempting to compile from source would fail for 90% of the stuff on 
Sourceforge/Freshmeat.
- The other repositories never seemed to have what I wanted or it was 
not compiled for my RH version. Even then, it often didn't work as expected.

This all somehow/someway got a *lot* better with the arrival of RH9. 
Don't ask me what changed. And now RH/FC appears to have latched onto 
the idea of a software repository.

RH/FC still has the unbearable problem that distro upgrades must be done 
with "disk in hand" and with the system shut down rather than "online 
and in-place".

Just my experiences ...
Michael