I am puzzled by this debate. Why is package management such an issue? In my preferred distro (Slackware) installation and/or upgrading seems, for the most part, to "just happen". I seem to have remarkably few problems, and "dependency hell" is becoming a distant memory. I use "slackpkg" to upgrade, and it is simply a matter of entering a minimal amount of text, and walking away for some time (I have a 56k dial-in connection).
It isn't that I am expecting very little from my computers: I run the almost all the usual stuff - Open Office, various graphics packages, email/web-browsing, programming tools, MP3/DVD players plus three packages which have been, in one way or another, quite problematic on other distros from time to time. These packages are: GRASS, R, and LyX. All three work perfectly on my slack-boxes.
Am I missing something?
I remember the times before package management. I used to use Slackware 3.6. The first Linux I ever used. After installation from CD (or floppies) you were on your own. No nifty tools to upgrade versions or patch bugs. You could run the setup tools and install something still on the CD but that was about it. When you wanted to install a new application that didn't come with your distro you had to download the source and build it yourself. This ultimately became a nightmare. Especially if you wanted to uninstall something that had sprayed itself all over /usr/local and didn't have a 'uninstall' make build target. Or if the application required a different version of a library you had already installed. Modern package management systems relieve us of the need to build things from source, and allow us to easily install, upgrade and remove applications at will. All the hard source building and compatibility work has been done for us by people who enjoy (or get paid for) that sort of thing. This has greatly reduced the amount of work a system administrator has to do. But like everything, package management systems are not perfect and differ in many ways from each other. Hence the endless debates about .deb vs .rpm, apt vs yum, etc. However if you think about it we should actually just shut up and kiss the ground package manager authors, and package repository builders walk on because they truly are a god send. For example, just today I set Synaptic to download a couple hundred megs of updates to fedora core 3 (+ additions) from a variety of different online RPM repositories and didn't even have to think about whether my configs would be fiddled with, or whether the new library versions would conflict with currently installed apps or anything. Hallelujah brother. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com