Fedora without RPM?

[Alan Cox]

> In the past, I ran into too many dependencies, cyclical dependencies,
> and other problems. For an over-simplified example, package B requires
> package A, which requires package B. More complicated problems can
> include package contents, maybe like file A conflicts with library B
> in package C...

yum does all that for you. rpm is a package management tool, it doesn't
deal with the higher level questions

> There are even examples of such serious dependency problems with RPM
> in very recent threads from other users in this same mailing list,
> "Yum problem" and "Dependencies missing ??".

Usually because people have either picked packages from other places and
tried to do impossible updates (which are correctly blocked) or did an
update from a mirror mid-change.

> I'm not currently using Fedora, but I'm trying to find out if it's the
> Linux for me yet. I've used several RPM-based distros, RH 5.2,
> Mandrake 8.1, and Caldera, in the past.

Fedora + yum is a way way nicer than the rpm fun of the older rpm using
distros like 5.2.

> I think the RPM-based distributions, RPM dependency chains, and the
> RPM program itself, have what I consider to be excessive hardware
> requirements, as I'm a minimalist on a low budget.

Fedora is realistically aimed at boxes with 256MB upwards for the full
desktop and the default install. You can get it to run nicely in a lot
less by dumping Gnome, KDE, Openoffice, Evolution for xfce, abiword and
claws-mail but the defaults are aimed at the typical box of today not
minimal systems.

Alan