In part, Sam Varshavchik wrote: > > rpm really needs to go. > To be replaced by what? Sure, rpmbuild & rpm are the Swiss Army knives of software packagers and package-loaders. They can be difficult to use and aren't documented in the man pages very well. But writing as someone who once implemented a software packaging/install scheme in the pre-rpm days to build, package, distribute, install and upgrade a proprietary version of Unix, it's an exceptionally difficult problem to solve and rpm has mostly solved it. Generally, when users have trouble with an %post failing, it's the fault of the people who created the rpm package, not rpm's fault. This is what bugzilla's for, but for a number of diverse reasons, few Linux users bother reporting install and upgrade problems. And if the creators of a package don't know it's busted in certain situations, how can they fix it? It might be nice if "rpm --test" did what it promised, but as I recall, it doesn't fake running %post scriptlets. There's a good reason for that. It's yet another exceptionally hard problem to solve correctly for all the circumstances under which it's likely to be used. Think for a second about how hard it is to fake (with --test) removing a file with "rm" and then 50 lines later testing for the file's existence as a trigger for doing a bunch of other stuff, including creating some files. Then generalize that for touch, cp, ln, et cetera. It gets kinda hairy when you finally work your way up to faking cc and ld. And for what? All to avoid a few "no such file or directory"/"unable to remove" type errors when you run rpm in anger... err, without "--test". Like they used to say in WWII when fuel was being rationed: "Is this trip necessary?" Nope. In the end, the only person responsible for what's on your machine is the person with the root password. For desktop and notebook PCs, that's usually the person at the keyboard. If you ignore warnings in the install and upgrade logs, be prepared to have dusty files laying around. And, because of PATH issues, some of these dusty files will be used instead of the freshest stuff. But then Unix in general and Linux in particular have always been caveat emptor and RTFM kinds of operating systems. If you sign up, you sign up for the whole deal. And if you didn't sign up for that, well... buy a Mac. -S
