Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

I used to use SuSE back in the day (around v10 or so), but the issue I had with it was the RPM package management. Several times it managed to get into an inconsistent state on various servers without it obviously being due to my incompetence, so I ended up migrating everything to DEB based systems (Ubuntu was my choice) and have had far less problems since.

View on HN

I had the same experience. Rustling RPMs was a nightmare back in the day. In fact, it's what moved me from some redhat (SUSE?) back in the day to mandrake linux.

But Mandrake Linux also used RPMs.

Mandrake and Mageia use urpmi. It's a tool similar to apt, yum and zypper. It has been in existence since 1999. It can be used to install packages and also to upgrade a complete system, it will take care of dependencies for you.

> Rustling RPMs

fyi the term is actually "rassling", unless referring to stealing rpms from other ranchers

"Wrangling" is also acceptable

That'll git ya a necktie party sure as shootin'.

What I did with rpms definitely felt criminal.

Are RPMs structurally quite different from DEBs? Or was the problem that RPM tooling was buggy?

Not really, rpm and dpkg are similar and both solid - and have been for years.

Not sure but what instability the parent post is referring to but SuSE V10 came out in 2006 - I suspect the problems have been ironed out.

Quite possibly, but I've also had some issues with the various kernel versions (e.g. "unbreakable") in Oracle Linux v7. I've had the occasional issue with broken dependencies with dpkg, but they've always seemed much easier to resolve and generally involved just uninstalling the broken package.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com