The World of a Penguin

Red Hats Colby Hoke tells here that they introduced yum to solve the dependency hell. He continues: "Red Hat led the way [...] to solve a customer problem the dependency hell." He missed totally that they were more or last the last of the major Linux distributions to solve this problem. Or does he means that they were the first suits that talked about that they had solved a problem, other Linux users didn't have. To lead does not mean to just be in front of Solaris and Microsoft, it means to be in front of all. Does he knows that Y in yum stands for Yellow Dog, which is a Linux-distribution Macs. The dependency hell was one of the reason why I left Red Hat and Fedora in favor of first Debian and later Ubuntu.

Hans asked a while ago about packaging software for Ubuntu/Debian. Here are some hints and good pointers, I hope. I have for a long time build RPM-packages for various distributions. When I began to create .debs this was booth good and bad to have a good knowledge about RPMs. Debian has a lot of utilities that makes things very smoothly, there are a lot of these tools I miss when creating RPM:s now days. On the other hand when you are used to describe your package in one .spec-file you may be a bit scared of all files you got in your debian-directory. Briefly described, the debian directory and .spec file has the same goal. They describe how to build the package from the source. I would say that if you are building a very simple package RPM:s are easier but as soon as you want to do more complex things deb:s are easier. for instance one thing you get help with creating debs is restarting daemons correct after upgrades etc, this is a mes for RPMs. I will not describe exactly what to ...