[wplug] dependency hell

[Bryon Gill]

Redhat 9 did suffer this problem, and especially now that it's out of date. 
Fedora is functionally the successor to RH9, and it's about to go into it's 
third release since it assumed that mantle.

You can get  better dependency handling if you install apt-get and synaptic for 
redhat.  Freshrpms is a good place to start.

This page has a list of repositories, many of which still have RH9 packages:
http://freshrpms.net/apt/repositories.html

This page contains apt for redhat9:
http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/redhat/9/apt/

Finally, it looks as if this site has an apt-rpm repository for redhat 9 that 
includes the Gimp 2.0.4:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~liblit/sampler/downloads/

Newer versions of Fedora use yum for the up2date system, which handles 
dependency checking somewhat more gracefully than RH9's up2date did.  Users 
of Gentoo and Debian seem to have the cleanest and most complete upgrade 
systems, but in my experienceinstalling and maintaining installations of those 
two is much harder than fedora/redhat.  YMMV of course.

Good luck!

Bryon



On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:

> Okay, I now regret ever, EVER listening to my "userfriendly" windows-using
> friend who told me all those months ago to "Use Redhat 9.0, it's the most
> mainstream Linux distribution."  Now I'm just trying to upgrade the Gimp
> to some version that is not stone-aged, and I'm in dependency hell.
> First, the automated RPM upgrade tool, up2date, requires some kind of
> registration and, from what I've read, won't work anyway because it's
> outdated, now that Redhat has gone all Enterprise.
>
> So AFAIK I'm forced to fix dependencies (and there are many) by hand, only
> I can't do that because upgrades aren't permitted for rpms that are in use
> by another rpm.  Witness:
>
> one required package for gimp-2.0.4-0:
>        fontconfig >= 2.2.0 is needed by gimp-2.0.4-0.fc2.1
>
> But, if I try to update fontconfig to 2.2.3-1, I find:
>        freetype >= 2.1.4 is needed by fontconfig-2.2.3-1
>
> BUT, if I try to update freetype to 2.1.9-1, I find (circularly):
>        freetype = 2.1.3-6 is needed by (installed) freetype-devel-2.1.3-6
>
> And, finally, I cannot update or erase freetype-devel because:
>        freetype-devel >= 2.1.2-7 is needed by (installed) fontconfig-devel-2.1-9
>
> Geez.  I guess I've gotten rusty with Linux, or (flame bait) spoiled by
> FreeBSD.
>
> Am I missing something obvious, or am I just out of luck for having this
> bastardization of a system running an unsupported distro and a patchwork
> of incorrectly installed packages?
>
> Also, I'm becoming aware of my own frequent posts to the list.  Am I
> becoming a nuisance yet?  If so, have no fear: I'm taking a vacation
> starting Wednesday.
>
> -Brandon
>
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