[conspire] Re: conspire Digest, Vol 17, Issue 7

[Rick Moen]

Quoting bruce coston (jane_ikari at yahoo.com):

> a. do you really need to upgrade that part of your os
> installation? , .rpm distributions remain harder to
> upgrade than .deb linux distributions, rick has some
> stuff about it somewhere on linuxmafia.com, i think.
> the .deb packaging system tries to anticipate ways out
> of situations like yours and the strict policies of
> debian re packages make it easier on the
> administrator. .rpm's don't try to resolve
> dependencies as comprehensively. i don't have a
> specific answer 4u but good luck , hope u don't have
> to reinstall but fedora seems 2b red-hat experimental

Fedora seems to do pretty well at that sort of thing, generally.  
You may or may not be able to smoothly upgrade the system in perpetuity,
avoiding the need to do a fresh install of (e.g.) Fedora Core 3 at some
point, but it definitely works well for routine maintenance, and there's
nothing wrong with the RPM package format (other than gratuitous changes
to its definition, at a couple of points in the past).

The key to keeping everything going without reinstalls or major glitches
is indeed the enforcement of a consistent distribution policy.  The 
piece on that point that you had in mind is:  "Policy" on
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/ .