Sam Varshavchik and a lot of other people wrote some thoughtful
replies, but:
1) trust me, the Debian system is just as broken. I spend a lot of time
sorting out both distros.
1a) regarding yum, what good is a distro without an upgrade system?
2) a few other rhetorical comments-
Isn't this a result of the torrent of new apps that has arrived since
RH7-8 and Debian Woody days?
Isn't this fundamentally the same shared library disaster that they call
dll-hell on Windows? Boy howdy that Windows repository was a great
solution...
At bottom isn't this a rate-of-change issue? The Mac world solves this
by welding the hood shut. As soon as you start adding uncommon software
there, OSX has problems too.
I'll donate to an OS solution to the multimedia problem.
3) I guess if I could wave a wand, I'd have a set of common fundamental
libraries that get shared and maintain compatibility between distro
releases, and everything else would be handled by the applications
themselves. Maybe this is plain dumb, but it sure would be easier for me...
John Fisher
