On 2012-10-11 21:45, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Yeah, it was one of the things that convinced me to *not* use Redhat. I saw a similar thing back in the Bad Old Days of Win98, Win2k, and their ilk, where installing a driver would sometimes prompt you something to the effect of "this driver needs to install a file that already exists; overwrite the file, delete it, or skip it?" None of those options should be anything the *user* has to decide, IMO. It essentially amounted to "flip a coin and pray the OS won't crash, and if you're *really* lucky the driver might actually work". Things like that convinced me *not* to use Windows. (I don't know if Windows still does that, as I don't use it anyore; but for everyone else's sake I would certainly hope it doesn't!)
Haha.
Of course, IIRC Redhat has since fixed this broken design, but the horrible memory of it stuck. Debian, OTOH, has a depends-on-package policy, which results in a much saner system where a package can specify a dependency on other packages (with an entire package as a unit), optionally with a version constraint, and thus be ensured that it will get the correct versions of all related files. That was one of the things that convinced me to use Debian. :)
That's how it should work. The smallest unit should be a package. -- /Jacob Carlborg
