Re: package managers [was: FatELF patches...]

[Mikulas Patocka]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009, Alan Cox wrote:

> > - With Linux package managers, the user is stuck with the software and 
> >   version shipped by the distribution. If he wants to install anything 
> >   newer or older, it turns into black magic and the typical desktop user 
> >   (non-hacker) can't do it.
> 
> In the rpm/yumworld that would be "yum downgrade" and "yum upgrade" for
> packages or whatever button on whatever gui wrapper you happen to have.

And what if there isn't a package? Upgrade option doesn't solve the need 
for [ distributions X software ] matrix of packages.

> And of course yum supports third party repositories so you can also deal
> with the updating problem which Windows tends not to do well for third
> party software.

A practical example --- when I wanted to get Wine on RHEL 5, all I found 
was a package for 1.0.1. Nothing newer.

I managed to compile the current version of Wine (it wasn't straghtforward 
and took few days to solve all the problems) and it ran the program I 
wanted. But I can imagine that a typical business user or home gamer will 
just say "that Linux sux".

You can say that I should delete RHEL-5 and install Fedora, but that is 
just that "upgrade one program" => "upgrade all programs" problem.

Mikulas
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