Upgrading rpm packages

[Ray Strode]

> However Red Hat's Rawhide has a libmng-1.0.1.  Here is a very fast mirror
> that I usually use.
> ftp://ftp.proxad.net/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/rawhide/i386/RedHat/RPMS/
> 
> You could try uninstalling Mandrake's "libmng1", and install Red Hat's
> package Rawhide.  It may work.
bad news.. Don't do that.  If you uninstall libmng1, then any package that 
depends on libmng1 won't know that you have a compatible library.  In
this case, all mandrake packages that look for libmng, look for libmng1 
in the rpmdb.  So removing it, would mean the next time you wanted to
install a Mandrake package that used libmng, you would have to --force
and --nodeps.  This will quickly lead to a very untidy db.  I think in this
case, since the version numbers are so close, their is almost certainly 
binary compatibility between the two.  That means it's probably okay to
install over the older library from a differenent distro, but don't remove the 
old package from the db. 

There is one other really bad problem with mixing and matching rpms for
different distributions: They have different directory trees and file structures.
This is somewhat tamed by the LSB, but it can still cause problems.   In
general, RedHat and Mandrake are pretty close, and PLD is a little bit 
farther, whereas SuSE is completely different.  So if you have to mix and
match, try to choose a distro that is close to yours.

> 
> Something that I like about Red Hat is their Rawhide tends to be more up to
> date than Mandrake's Cooker.
Actually, Rodney got his rpm from PLD which is usually more uptodate than 
Rawhide even.  Although, RedHat is closer to Mandrake, so it maybe a better
fit.  (In this case I don't think it would matter)

--Ray