[wplug] SLES 9.0 questions

wmoran at potentialtech.com wmoran at potentialtech.com
Mon Oct 25 15:50:02 EDT 2004


Quoting "Michael A. Smith" <michael at smith-li.com>:
> I guess what you're talking about is package management, the art of
> getting the latest/safest/best software on your linux box without
> breaking it.
>
> Package management is the Holy Grail of open source BSD and Linux, and
> in my opinion is a sound explanation why people switch to the so-called
> "harder" distributions, such as Gentoo, Debian, or one of the BSDs.

I originally wasn't going to reply to this, as I don't have a suggestion
on how to manage RPMs on any platform, but ... if we're recommending
alternatives:

FreeBSD's portupgrade system is the cream of the crop, in my opinion.
Couple it with portaudit (which checks your installed packages against
an online database of known problems to alert you to potential issues)
and you have a duo that is yet to be matched by any other system I've
seen.

Not that some of the other systems aren't nice.  Apt-get, in particular,
is a very good system.  I can't speak of portage, as I've not used it
yet.

-Bill



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