On 4 Dec 2003, seth vidal wrote: > > > Ok...uh, I'm assuming there's a good reason for this, right? Don't tell > > me it's for the same reasons you can't upgrade Red Hat 9 to EL3 --- > > because it's for your own good. > > b/c I'm not going to write a program that lets the user shoot him or her > self in the foot. That was not the point of yum and it won't be the > point of yum. This has been a hard and fast rule for a long time and I'm > not waivering on this one. To amplify a bit further -- if you know enough to be able to figure out the dependency issues then: a) You know enough to be able to just do an rpm --force or --nodeps AND to know that it is really safe. If it is really safe -- which is not, actually, terribly easy to determine without extensive testing. You can also likely cope (possibly swearing and cursing, but cope) with the possible sequelae of discovering the hard way that it isn't as safe as you thought. An "ordinary user" might well be able to break the shit out of their system using yum without meaning to if it were enabled, and would be left cursing and fuming and unable to put things back the way they were. So rpm is the low level tool for you the expert, yum the high level tool with more protection for the masses (AND for you the expert, most of the time:-). b) If you are paying for commercial software, you hopefully are entitled to at least some measure of support. Bitch to the vendor that they are shipping broken RPMs. This is the "right" solution. Any vendor that ships RPMs in the first place -- especially for money -- should use some of that money to pay somebody to provide professional quality work, which in my mind absolutely includes unborked RPMs. If this means that they have to maintain a whole repository tree of RPM's custom built for various linux distros, so be it, it's why you pay them. Refer them to yum as a DISTRIBUTION tool on their end. You should be able to yum-install directly from their (possibly password enabled) repository, for example. rgb Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
