Star openSUSE 11.0: 'Smooth Outside, Rough Inside'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Jul 2008 15:03 UTC, submitted by sb56637
SuSE, openSUSE Most reviews - so far - of openSUSE 11.0 have been quite positive, but that doesn't automatically mean everybody is happy. TechReview offers some criticism of the latest offering from openSUSE. "openSUSE 11.0 is a difficult system to qualify. Highlights include good availability of current packages and YAST GUI configuration tools for some advanced features. However, these advantages are largely eclipsed by a chaotic, dysfunctional package management system and marginal performance. New Linux users with more complex network configurations or challenging hardware may be forced to use openSUSE due to its unique innovations in GUI system configuration. Yet, experienced and inexperienced users alike may find themselves increasingly frustrated by the grave lack of refinement in what is an otherwise capable Linux distribution."
E-mail Print r 3   42 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/fdz
Thread beginning with comment 320917
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
_txf_
Member since:
2008-03-17

Whilst I would call the new dependency solver good, it is nowhere near the best in terms of end user experience. It still gets tripped up when I choose certain packages in the wrong order (change the order I select the packages and magically there is no conflict).

Deb based distros provide better results at a package level, but AFAIK the suse solver needs to work with rpms which is file based dependency (a lot harder to get right).

I would say suse has the best rpm based package management system hands down, but in terms of ease of use it is still too complicated (reflects deb complexity vs rpm complexity).

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

AdamW Member since:
2005-07-06

There's no intrinsic difference between dependencies in .rpm and .deb. You can have real, virtual and file dependencies in both: just depend on a package's actual name, have packages with explicit Provides, or depend on a file. The way dependencies are actually done is entirely an implementation detail down to the distribution, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the packaging format used.

For instance, in Mandriva, the use of file-based dependencies is entirely deprecated and considered a packaging error. I don't know how SUSE handles things, but from what I've seen, it doesn't rely on file dependencies much.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 4

elsewhere Member since:
2005-07-13

TI don't know how SUSE handles things, but from what I've seen, it doesn't rely on file dependencies much.


RPM intrinsically relies on file-based dependencies. It's the key differentiator from DEB. openSUSE follows the RPM standard, as do the other RPM-based distros (though Mandriva has it's own flavor of RPM).

The benefit is that you can theoretically package a KDE app (for instance) in an rpm, and it should resolve in Fedora or openSUSE, despite the fact that the KDE libraries are packaged as kde3libs or kdelibs3 depending on the distro, as long as the library version levels meet the dependency requirements.

The drawback has historically been performance, since there is much more meta data for the dependency solver to deal with, but as has been addressed in the posts above, openSUSE (and Red Hat) have made significant strides in that area.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3