RPM apt

[Mark Street]

At 06:31 PM 7/21/2002 -0700, Eric Eisenhart wrote:
>The issue really isn't apt; it's the RPM packages.
>
>Or maybe not...
>
>Did you install qmail using RPMs, or did you install by hand?

By hand from source.


>Is it asking for "sendmail" or "/usr/sbin/sendmail"?  Is it insisting on
>any particular version?

It is a dependency for sendmail the package, not the binary.


>My recommendation is to fix it so that /usr/sbin/sendmail is in the rpm
>database.  If you were on a Debian box and installed qmail with apt, it
>wouldn't be a problem because the quality control standards that the Debian
>project has would make sure it had the appropriate things in place to
>provide the same thing as sendmail according to the database.  (actually,
>the qmail package on Debian provides "mail-transport-agent" which is what
>the sendmail package on Debian provides.

This is one of the drawbacks/strengths/weakness of a "database" holding the 
keys to these package tools.  I could install sendmail, then break it by 
moving the binaries out of the way and putting the symlink back to qmail's 
sendmail wrapper.  Then on OS upgrade having to go back in and break it 
again.   Oh well....

>Apt, by design, has nothing to "force install despite lack of dependencies";
>that's the job of "dpkg" (or on an RPM based system, "rpm"). On a Debian box
>if you want that I think there's a set of options to get apt to download the
>most appropriate package for you, which you could then force an install on,
>but basicaly apt really doesn't like having a system where dependencies
>aren't met (according to the database it's using; "./configure ; make all &&
>make install" doesn't count)