> ... And on the other side of the coin, if you
>insist on distributing your program in some
>garbage proprietary binary format like RPM, the
>very least you could do is provide source
>packages with working makefiles.
>
> Dar "the whole world should just go back to
>using .tgz" ien

Bah. A package manager is a necessity if you're admining more than just a few machines, or (even more importantly) if you're not the only one who has root on the boxes you admin. I don't want to sit there and say "Hrm, did I install program X or not? Where would I have put that? /usr/local? /opt?". Even if I have my own standard, the other admins in my group might have had to do an 'emergency' (defined as: some developer realized just today that he needs this program to finish his project that he started 8 months ago, and the deadline is tonight) install of some software while I was unavailable and have dumped it in some random directory just to get the thing up for the guy who was breathing down his neck to get it done. I want to just be able to do a "rpm -q program_name" or "pkginfo package_name" or "swlist | grep program_name" and find out instantly if it's installed or not, and be able to use similar commands to get rid of it if I don't want it.

Worse yet, too many idiots make tar.gz files with absolute pathnames. What if I didn't *want* that damn thing installed in /usr/local/program_name? Too freakin' bad, you'd better tar it up yourself or remember to override the absolute pathnames next time.

As for RPM itself being crappy, I really have no opinion. I've only just started admining Linux again recently. The one thing *I* hate about Linux (at least RedHat--can't speak for any other distros right now) is that there doesn't even seem to be any central place programs get loaded to. I install a .rpm package, and magically it works even though it looks to me like all the files disappeared into the ether somewhere, because damned if *I* can find a directory that seems to have them in it. I'm used to Sun machines trying to install everything in /opt/program_name, or others that put things in /usr/program_name or /usr/local/program_name. RedHat just seems to eat all the files and not put them anywhere, and yet everything seems to work. I need to explore this more, but I have this sinking feeling most everything gets rammed into /usr/bin, which is just about the worst way I can think to do it.

-- Dave