[baldfat]

I know you didn't mean to bring this up as a point against rpm but my ALL TIME MOST HATED PHASE is rpm hell. I still hear people say that they won't use RPM based systems because of RPM Hell which makes me inside want to jump through the screen and shake them and say "Have you ever built a single package?! Because if you ever have you would know this is 100% crap for over 10 YEARS!"

Sure there was a time frame when there was an issue with dependency and it was fixed but everyone treated it like it still was an issue 5+ years later.

Sorry rant over but I just want people to know that RPM issue was just an issue in the early 2000s and Redhat made --redhatprovides and --redhatrequires command line options that if people used them would fix the issues at the time till things got changed with libraries.

[IgorPartola]

Sorry, but I am still stuck in my own version of RPM hell, and yes I have packaged RPM's.

The problem: production servers for a client use RHEL 6.3 and are very slow to upgrade. Moreover, they don't have the subscription to RH's commercial repos, and instead host their own, which means that some packages are straight up missing.

For development I use CentOS of a matching version. All works well until I go to deploy something to production and find out that a package I need is not available. The solution has been to (a) install packages from the CentOS repos (yup, old school download them off their site and then `rpm -i` them locally) or ask the client's IT to temporarily enable certain repos of later RHEL versions they have, so that I can install packages with lots of missing dependencies. The most recent fiasco with this involved ImageMagick and ImageMagick-dev not being there and depending on a crapton of libraries that were also missing.

Now, I am not RPM-distro professional, I stick to Debian derivatives for the most part, but I have worked with them enough to know that unless you do things by RH's book, you are going to be in trouble, and even people whose full time jobs it is to maintain these production servers seem to have a really hard time figuring out how to get this right.

P.S.: One solution I attempted was to create my own RPM repo that I could these missing packages from. This worked for some, until it landed me in a world of hurt where yum really wanted to install i386 versions of the packages instead of x64, even though (a) the server was x64 and (b) both versions of the package were available. This resulted in yum refusing to do anything because it saw conflicts. I have never had these types of problems with Debian based distros and a day of Googling for answers did not solve it.

[jrumbut]

I too am mostly a Debian guy but it sounds like your situation has less to do with RPM than it does with a client putting themselves in a crazy situation.

The whole point of getting your OS from RH is that RH has a book that you can do things by and be pretty well assured of the results. When they decided to no longer subscribe to that they really should have switched to a community managed Linux version.

I can't imagine the one time cost of moving their production servers to CentOS would be more than the continual update pains they're experiencing.

[IgorPartola]

I assume so, though the part where yum could not figure out the server's architecture was really odd.

I would love for them to move to CentOS, or Fedora or whatever. The problem is that they are a huge healthcare company, and I am a part time subcontractor.

[baldfat]

This is 100% not an RPM issue. You have missing dependencies that is a repo issue. Same thing with Debian or any other package management system.

[creshal]

RPM seems hell enough in current versions: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a81c11aa

Disclaimer, I've never worked with it, I don't know how accurate the description is.

[baldfat]

So you post a German blog post about something you have never done. I now have gone full on salt.

Once again their is nothing wrong with RPM and this anti-RPM stuff needs to just die. Linus uses Fedora and if anyone would flip out if something was bad technology Linus would, but instead people who just heard a cool RPM Dependency Hell still continue this 10+ year old issue over and over again without knowing anything technical about why it was an issue (For a short period of time) and how it was fixed.

[creshal]

> So you post a German blog post

I'm sorry, I didn't know Germans weren't allowed to have opinions.

[adrusi]

But if your goal is to provide veracity to your claim, then posting a German article on an English forum isn't very useful.

[sbarker]

Google translate... We have the technology, just not the sense to use it :-(

[baldfat]

> just not the sense to use it :-(

A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM ISSUE.

2) Oh and who the RPM file format has since devised please ?! What's that supposed to be? If the alien invaders drive you crazy, so they can not exterminate mankind? Holy shit. By contrast, even the Debian stuff is obvious and self-explanatory! And self-documenting all. As a .deb works, one can find out with file and home remedies, you do not even need a hex editor."

C) This guy is clueless he says Gnome handles this better then RPM? What does a Desktop Environment have to do with RPM? Does he equate Gnome with Debian/Ubuntu and thinks Gnome is Deb?

"Does "deltarpm". Say, is that a joke here? Even Rotz Gnome checked before building if its dependencies are fulfilled!"

D) The guy saying the standard has different versions? It was the official standard of the Linux Foundation. http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/lsb.shtml

"First there are RPM directly two strands, RPM and RPM 4 5, and both claim to be the "official" RPM. Lolwut?"

E) Why would anyone need a hex editor for when looking at RPM its plain text?

If you can't find anything on the issue in several languages it isn't an issue. RPM is a stable good technology that people randomly out of what need to put down without knowingly what they are talking about.

Enough said about this stupid blog post:

"My goodness. And I know otherwise perfectly sane people who swear on CentOS! Update: Maybe I should say, as I so imagine a package management tool. My request would be that always works. Python zerschossen? Perl is not installed? glibc update failed in the middle? The package manager needs to go and can still be saved. And it must be small enough to fit with metadata in 5 MB. Must also without OpenSSL and curl and wget can work, at least in an emergency. Of the systems that I've seen so far, I like best pacman (Arch Linux). But there is something else."