Jethro Cramp wrote:
Somewhere between 6.0 and 6.4 I played with Mandrake for awhile. Although I'mm not interested in discussing the general pros and cons between Mandrake and SuSE I would like to bring up a difference in their communities with respect to RPM.
Mandrake has a very active user contributed RPM compiling project. You only have to look on rpmfind.net and you can see that usually Mandrake has the most up-to-date RPM's available. It was whilst being involved in this that I learnt to make rpms from srcrpms using Mandrake's very clear HOW-TO.
SuSE does a wonderful job of making RPM's available to its' users for a wide range of programs. But this really isn't enough. Redhat based RPMs are ubiquitous. New users to SuSE all too easily can end up downloading the wrong RPM (witness Ron Sinclair's recent problem with quanta) and then get frustrated. To change this situation we all need to contribute by taking the miscellaneous RPMs that we build in the course of the daily use of our systems and upload them to rpmfind.net etc.
Of course sometimes because of the individual nature of everybody's systems someone is going to download an rpm and it isn't going to run; but that is still better than not having a suse rpm at all.
To make this work SuSE needs to take the initiative and write some guidelines for newbies to follow and publish this in a prominent position on their website, in the installed docs and in their manuals. I think that this would have a very positive effect on the useability and accessibility (excuse the marketing speak) of the SuSE distribution.
What does everybody else think?
Jethro, I think you have some points there. I wondered a few times how on earth a rpm is generated, how the files get in, all the lot. It never bothered me so much to look round and dig for docs. I also hope that one day all this will be history, that you can fetch any rpm and install it on any system. Another thing worth fighting for. ;-) Juergen
Regards,
Jethro
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