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On 2011-05-06, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> P. S. One would think a Gentoo system could sit idle for a couple |
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> months without this sort of mess. |
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It depends on which "couple of months" you happen to pick. ;) |
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Most of the time "a couple months" is OK. Once in a while there will |
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be several major updates for different packages in a short span and |
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for certain configurations if you don't do them incrementally stuff |
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breaks rather badly without some rather detailed shepherding from the |
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user along the way. |
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Still, it's nothing like the major upgrade disasters and RPM |
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dependency hell that I so vividly remember from my RedHat and Mandrake |
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days. |
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I specifically remember trying to upgrade from RedHat 6.x to 7.0. It |
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was a complete disaster. It turned out that even a clean install of |
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RH 7.0 was almost unusable, and the "7" series was really ready for |
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prime time until about 7.3. That was when I gave up on RedHat -- and |
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I had been using RedHat since before they used version numbers (I |
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think I started with the "Mother's Day" release). |
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Mandrake seemd a little better, but it still had the same basic |
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problem: any time you wanted a package that wasn't on the base install |
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CD, the only viable choice was to build it from sources, because every |
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binary RPM that you could find always required different library |
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versions that what you hand installed. When you tried to build from |
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source, you found out you didn't have have the "devel" versions of the |
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right libararies. If you tried to update libraries it would start a |
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chain-reaction of dependancy problems that didn't end until you were |
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standing there with a smoking gun picking bits of drive platter out of |
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your hair. |
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