RPM hell, part two

Apparently, me posting the actual evidence as to what was going on in that particular case didn't stop some people from making stupid and ignorance-ridden counterpoints:

Before starting, I would like to say the following: none of these people could grasp the simple (yet implied) intent of the article: that Fedora packages are usually what Red Hat bases itself upon to build RHEL and RHAS, thus it is (at least in Red Hat's, but most likely) in everyone's best interests to produce high-quality packages that take legacy situations into account. We're talking about millions of users, that get bitten by problems fairly similar or identical to the problem pinpointed in the original article about RPM packaging.

Of course, that kind of ignorance and head thickness is what prompts our first moron of the day, Matt, to say:

What a crybaby! Like the packagers owe you something! Use it or don’t use it. You sound unbelievably immature in your comments above. You ask others to digg your blog so people will fix your “problem”? Your problem is that you are still 14. Grow up, learn to write, and try not to embarrass yourself at every turn.
Sheesh… Some people!

According to Matt, apparently, I'm the only idiot with this kind of problem in the world (NOT!, as witnessed by further and sensible comments on my original post). It's evident that some people consider the output of rpm and other facts to be immature conversation. I'll spare my keyboard a response to his ad hominem attack for the next responses.

Yeah, it's pretty funny.

"My production machine can't use this devel-only distro that doesn't [yet] support these brand new packages... OH NOES!~!!!oneone!!!!"
Lamer

OK, this guy went to the length of copying and pasting this comment both in my site and in NewsForge. What he appeared not to have done is use his brain. If the commenter actually had a brain to use, he would have understood the RPM messages, or perhaps refrained from making any embarrassingly ignorant comments. The Ekiga package situation wasn't caused because of an FC6 packaging bug... it was caused because of an Ekiga packaging bug (restrictive dependencies detected by the dependency autoresolver). If Ekiga absolutely requires that specific ABI version of the library, it would be okay; but, as it turns out, Ekiga doesn't require that.

Notice how he says I'm a lamer. Never mind that I've been using and managing Linux since 1998, and that I've been preparing my own RPMs since 2002. Never mind that the fact that FC6 is a development distro doesn't mean shit and Ekiga should be equally supported.

But there's another counterpoint I could have made, and I'll make it. Imagine the outrage if Windows XP didn't support Office 97. Well, this user is saying exactly that, but from a Fedora point of view. I have a package from FC5. It should install cleanly under FC6. It doesn't. The notion of having to wait for a new Ekiga package in order to use it is absurd -- "no, sir, we don't support that, waves hands and throws them in the air, you'll just gonna have to recompile" -- what the fuck kinda idea is that? What are we doing here, Linux 1.0? Slackware 0.1?

1) quit whining
2) get out the crowbar.
Temporarily remove ekiga (missing a couple of phone calls won't kill you).
upgrade evolution, use ln -s to produce a symlink with the required name to the equiv lib in the new evolution. Then force install ekiga.
3) grow up

You completely missed the point about RPM. RPM is an automated package manager that is designed to prevent these situations and to automate file management, and system integrity verification. If you start doing things "the wrong way", you've automatically forfeited most of RPM's strengths, such as clean verifications. While it may be a nice stopgap measure, the correct fix is much better and, of course, cleanly applicable to a cluster of workstations. Plus, most package managers "a la Yum" refuse to work when "forced situations" (i.e. broken packages) are present.

What I still don't get is why people are advocating brokenness instead of clamoring for high-quality packaging work.

Notice how the commenter says that I should quit whining and grow up. I don't know if he thinks I'm whining because he's antagonized by the tone of my earlier writeup, or because he feels threatened by my looks. But in any case, it's apparently hip and cool to just dismiss software quality, and adopt a "what the fuck" attitude.

Fortunately for the world, there are other reader comments that do consider my "complaint" under a purely technical light, from which it of course makes sense.

OK, that's enough ranting for half an hour. The kind of comments I just quoted (which, sadly, illustrate the majority of points raised by people) keep convincing me that most people cannot tell their head from their ass. Let's keep up the good work, morons.