August 18, 2003

RedHat is Even More Brain-Damaged Than I Thought

In a comment to my previous entry, Nils Kassube points out that the RedHat glibc upgrade issue that lost me about a day of productivity, increasing the cost of the off-the-shelf RedHat by at least an order of magnitude, is a known bug, and was actually reported in April. Essentially, RedHat’s package management system will blissfully allow you to “upgrade” from the i686 version of glibc to the i386 version without warning, even though it’s been known for four months that this will CFTS.

If you read the bug report, you’ll find that they pretty much blame this on the user. “You should know better than to trust the package-management system to… you know… manage your packages!”

RedHat are quite obviously not ready to play with the adults yet. If you are considering RedHat Linux as a solution, walk away now.

Posted to nerd at August 18, 2003 11:20 PM
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Comments

Just in case someone recommends SuSE as a RedHat replacement: SuSE has no bug tracking system available to the public. It's not really obvious how to even report bugs by e-mail. I kid you not.

Posted by: Nils Kassube at August 19, 2003 03:11 AM (#link)

I've often wondered "is it just me, or does RedHat/RPM blow chunks?"

I'm just glad somebody else concurs.

Posted by: Vincent Murphy at August 19, 2003 06:03 AM (#link)

The secret to running redhat without pulling your hair out is install Ximain's Red Carpet.

http://www.ximian.com/products/redcarpet/download.html

Posted by: Milo S. at August 19, 2003 07:48 PM (#link)