Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 23rd Dec 2008 00:30 UTC
A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not interfere with existing package managers. Unlike existing package managers, Nix allows different versions of software to live side by side, and permits sane rollbacks of software upgrades.
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Member since:
2005-07-13
*heavy sigh*
I upgraded openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1 by changing my repos to point at 11.1, and then running Yast to upgrade all packages.
RPM-based distros will break on distro upgrades for exactly the same reason that Debian-based ones will: when you're using non-standard or third-party repos that aren't in synch.
The openSUSE build service, which houses a multitude of contributory repos, automatically builds packages against multiple versions (and distros) and updates packages when applicable dependencies change in those targets. The popular third party repos follow factory development and generally have repos available for the new version at release. This means that as long as you point to the new sources properly, then there should be little issue with updating.
As an example, I had unsupported KDE 4.2 packages from the build-service installed in 11.0. Upon upgrading, it updated the the appropriate unsupported KDE 4.2 packages for 11.1 along with the core 11.1 upgrade.
Dependency-hell disappeared a decade ago. If it still occurs, it's an issue with the packager, not the package management.