My impression is that they got a bad rep long ago before there were decent package managers. As I recall, you had to install dependencies manually and updating a system could get nightmarish. Nothing really wrong with rpm as a package technology per-se, but before yum it was a lot less friendly.
Just a couple of days ago I was doing an upgrade from 6.4 to 6.5 and yum died in the middle; fixing that was quite hellish as rpm somehow decided that multiple conflicting versions of several packages were installed at once (eg glibc v131 and v137), and it wouldn't do anything until that was fixed (it wouldn't even attempt to fix the problem until it was fixed... "yum-complete-transaction" just complained about things being inconsistent and wouldn't roll back or forwards - "transaction" my arse). Ended up fiddling with "rpm --no-deps" to fix individual packages after drawing out the dependency graph by hand :(
I've had problems with individual .deb packages before, but never broke the whole package management system quite like that before :P
That’s not something that can be made reliable with either rpm or apt. The only options for reliable upgrades are 1) nix model or 2) filesystem transactions/snapshots. Especially, yum has official plugin for making LVM/Btrfs/ZFS(?) snapshot before committing each transaction. I imagine there’s something similar for Debian/Ubuntu.
I did that, it bailed out because it wanted dependency problems to be fixed first (and the dependency fixer bailed out because it wanted the dupe problems to be fixed first)
Indeed, but even with YUM, the process is unsavory and the number of sources is surprising limited. I ended-up just compiling from source because it was faster than trying to deal with RPM dependency problems.
What you mean number of sources is limited? The distros come with their own repos with a large selection of software.
When you go outside of that, you need to have a specific reason...like going to RPM Fusion to grab things like non-free codecs.
I'm just guessing, but it sounds like you're going to rpmforge and downloading a random RPM, maybe it's not even for your distro, and installing it and then trying to find all the other dependencies and in the end you've got Fedora, CentOS, and SuSE packages all forced installed on the machine and maybe whatever you were trying to do worked. That tends to be what people who bitch about yum/rpm are doing: they're doing stupid things.
RPM/Yum works just fine for 99+% of its millions of users.
