On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 5:45 PM Dave Dykstra <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi Yasha,
>
> Yes this is one of the most significant differences between the Debian/
> dpkg/apt world and the Red Hat/SUSE/rpm/yum/dnf world.  It's a
> difference in philosophy and it is reflected in the tooling.  There are
> a lot more explicit package version dependencies in Debian that makes
> this possible.  On the other hand there's a lot less backporting that
> goes on there, so there's more instability.  I think that the
> requirement of going through extra effort every 5 to 10 years to do a
> reinstall from scratch is a deliberate choice in the rpm world.  I like
> the relative ease of Debian upgrades, but it does have some
> disadvantages too because you end up not upgrading some things.  For
> instance I haven't done a fresh install in around 20 years on my home
> Debian server, so as a consequence it is still using 32-bit executables
> even though the hardware has long been capable of 64-bit.

The process can be.... adventuresome for RHEL based operating systems.
Circular dependencis involving glibc and RPM can cause issues, and a
system built 3 years previously may have a subty distinct version of
ext2 or now xfs. I've been bitten that way.