Future (RPM based) linuxen: RHEL, FC, WBEL, Mandrake, SuSE?

[Tom Buskey]

>
>
> I'm partial to Debian but I'm obliged to work with
> RHAT boxes so I sat with a cow-orker as he tried apt
> on his RHAT box a few days ago and it appears that (at
> least during the simple test-drive we gave) it worked
> as reliably as I've ever seen it on a Debian box.
> This shouldn't have amazed me, but it did, even though
> I knew that Paul's point is on-target: the underlying
> package format is not to blame for the dependency
> problems experienced on RHAT systems.
>

I've been using Redhat since 3.0.3 (or sooner?) and Mandrake since 6.1
(when it was "Redhat w/ KDE") and I haven't experienced the "dependnecy
hell" everyone talks about unless I start using non Redhat or Mandrake
packages.

I've also run Ximian with Redhat & Mandrake.  Using red-carpet on either
platform or rpmdrake seems to work as well as the debian based systems
I've used (debian linux, fink on MacOS X.2 and another debian based pkg
system on OSX).

The dependnecy problems start when you grab 3rd party packages (mplayer)
or packages from another dist that packages them differently (SuSE, PLD,
Conectiva).  I think fink and the other MacOS-X can conflict, but they
both explicitly use different roots (/sw/fink and I forget the other) and
thus sidestep the problem at the expense of disk space.