Jim Henderson wrote:
> it does a reasonably good job of enforcing dependencies - 

There are relatively few kinds of dependencies it can enforce, and 
nothing enforces that the dependecy declarations are correct, for 
example. If the package doesn't allow it, the package manager isn't 
going to be able to do it.

You cannot, for example, look at the list of packages installed on the 
system and tell whether another package will install correctly - there 
may be unwritable files in the way that aren't tracked by the package 
manager, for example. The RPM may install files not listed in the 
manifest, and may not install every file listed in the manifest. If the 
package needs to add a user to the FTP server or something, there's 
nothing in the RPM that lets you look at it and tell automatically that 
adding that user will be necessary and needs to succeed before the 
package is installed. There is nothing in an RPM, as far as I know, that 
says which system services need to be enabled before you can start this 
one. (Sure, it's in the init.d script, but that's not in the package 
manifest, AFAIK.)

The Singularity package manager doesn't have this flaw, because the 
manifest controls what gets installed. There's no shell script in the 
package.

I'm not sure what you were trying to say with
> Well, RPMs aren't package *managers*, they're packages.  RPM is a package 
> manager,

I know that. That's what I was talking about. Nothing I said conflicts 
with this, as far as I can see.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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