[SGVLUG] RPM hell -- why not just change to debian?

[David Lawyer]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 01:09:52PM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> Debian based distros handle this well.  They have a replaces: field so 
> that when you upgrade the new package is installed, and the old is 
> removed.  My second install from back in 1999 is still running today and 
> it has been upgraded from Hamm (2.0) to Slink (2.1) to Woody (3.0) to 
> Sarge (3.1).  This install has survived all hardware it has been on, 
> including changing hard drives, and the entire system surrounding it.

I'm still running my Debian 1.1 install from 1996, which I've upgraded
a number of times with the "testing" release which includes later (and
sometimes more buggy) versions than the stable releases like Hamm,
Slink, etc.  Thus I've often kept ahead of the latest Debian stable
distribution.  It's been on 3 different computers, installed by moving
hard drives and then copying everything from the old hard drive to the
new hard drive of the "new" PC.

Before Debian had the apt-get upgrade system, I would just download
individual programs that I thought I might like (or needed) and
also download newer versions of the OS and programs I used a lot
(like vim).  Then when some wouldn't install due to lack of
prerequisites, I'd have to manually download them too.  And then these
sometimes had more dependencies, etc.  What a mess.  One could avoid
this by using "dselect" but there were just too many packages to select
from and it ran slow on my PC.

			David Lawyer