Public Rant: “RPM Hell”

The following is a public service announcement in rant format on a topic that I’ve reached my limit on:

If you believe “RPM Hell” already exists and say things like “Apt is better than RPM” you just announced to the world that you do not know what you are talking about. YOU ARE WRONG.

“RPM Hell” is a reference to the difficulty of taking a package file from one distribution family and trying to use it on the other. Newsflash: That was always a retarded idea. If the package wasn’t made for your distribution don’t freaking do it.

I don’t care what wizbang distribution you are using it, it’s always a bad idea. If it isn’t in the repository for your distribution and the software’s upstream provider doesn’t like your distribution enough to have a package for you, then sorry, you’ve just discovered the one way the Linux development model sucks. Whine at the people maintaining your distribution or pick a new one. The package management system we’ve all come to love was clearly designed with only server admins and developers in mind. And there is clearly no financial interest in making a desktop friendly system or someone would have paid to have it done already. Sorry, thems the breaks.

The Debian world has the same problem as it’s advocates claim “RPM” (what? tar.gz gets a pass?) has if you try to mix packages between distributions and versions. The only “Hell” that exists is when people do a google search and random grab a package from some random FTP site and give it a try. DON’T DO THAT. Apt will murder kittens and refuse to do anything for you ever again if you don’t uninstall the crap so don’t do it. Older versions of Yum will sulk at you and swear at you with a python traceback.

Why? You have taken a dependency management system and violated it. You’ve corrupted it. The relationships are no longer sane. There is a sad reality in why Windows and Mac apps carry so many libraries with them. This crap is hard and no one has figured out how to make it friendly to Joe Sixpack without compromising security by design with every app carrying around a complete library set which may never get updated or patched.

As a “workaround” any desktop distribution worth using has a massive repository enabled by default. And for those “questionable” things where you may or may not be violating federal law everyone “knows” of the ONE *cough*unofficial*cough* repository that you need. If you want a newer version of something from an upstream provider and they don’t have a dpkg or rpm file for your distribution version and you don’t want to compile it, sorry, you’ll have to do without.

If this is too hard for you, then sorry, Linux desktop is a failure for your use case. I feel for you, seriously. May I suggest an appliance or device if you really want an open source desktop? I hear EEEPCs have a decent out of the box experience if you want to buy something with Linux preinstalled. If you want an actual laptop maybe Dell installs media crap out of the box for Ubuntu. I would certainly hope they do.

And as for the other statement saying “Apt is better than RPM” is like saying “Fedex is better than a cardboard box”. Hello? Yum? Ever hear of it? It’s been around for years. Seriously, it’s god damn ignorant to make that statement. Please educate yourself if you’ve ever said this.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the “Coalition for Schooling Ubuntu Fanatics That Spew This Crap In Response To Genuine Technical Complaints About Ubuntu’s Shitty Kernel Maintenance.” Hmm. Perhaps I should shorten that up a bit.

Time for me to go back to figuring out why on Hardy I can’t use two mac80211 stack using wireless drivers at the same time without hundreds of lines of crap in dmesg and nothing happening.

(Update: OK, I forgot to include the profanity.)

The Future of IPv4

Required reading for anyone who deals with networks: The Future Without IPv6 and IPv6 and NAT… Again!.

If we have any hope of getting out of the NAT trap how does IPv4 become painful enough to compel the transition? Will hitting NAT scalability issues be enough? Or will the attractiveness of forcing end-users to be consumers and not producers by making servers and p2p impossible through multiple layers of NAT mean IPv4/NAT will be attractive to upstream providers involved with media organizations? (Hello, Time Warner!)