John P. Fisher writes:
1a) regarding yum, what good is a distro without an upgrade system?
Not much, but that's not the point. yum is just a bandaid that tries to cover an ever-expanding, stagnating wound.
Isn't this a result of the torrent of new apps that has arrived since RH7-8 and Debian Woody days?
Yes. That's the point. The rpm-based infrastructure is bursting at the seems.
Isn't this fundamentally the same shared library disaster that they call dll-hell on Windows?
No.
Boy howdy that Windows repository was a great solution...
Yes, and we have a Berkeley-DB package database, that is prone to corruption.
But the flip side of the coin is that if you keep the package repository metadata in flat files, it's going to take forever for simple install/uninstall transactions to get done. If you think yum is slow now, try to drive it off flat files…
Generally, storing package repository in some kind of a lightweight database is the right idea. It's the actual implementation that we have here, that's the problem.
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