Re-inventing wheels

Why does SuSE insist on re-inventing wheels that others have done a far better job of inventing? I don’t get it. Specifically I am referring to not using yum in favor of their zypper and zmd and …

C’mon SuSE, get with the program. Use yum. So we can stop messing around with yet-another-broken-thing-that-promises-to-be-better-someday. The yum “packaged” with SuSE is old, and broken. Worse, it sometimes, mysteriously fails. And even worse, it is effectively impossible to upgrade to the latest version. I think technologists have a tendency to fall in love with their technology, excluding other technology that is simply better, that they cannot see or refuse to see. Its bad enough that package name variations are causing fits among groups creating RPMS going across distributions (yeah, I have problems with RPMs as well, but that is another post). Currently the OFED build scripts presume distribution specific names. I have some of these things building on Ubuntu by a) installing RPM, and b) commenting out the “requires” bits that use RPM to figure out if it has a particular subsystem. The process of using RPM to build packages means you have to buy into a particular name space. The process of using zypper, zmd, … means you have to buy into using a particular installer system. One that has on more than one occasion gone pear shaped hard and fast. SuSE. Stop zypper. Stop zmd. They are broken. Use yum. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. Its been invented, and is pretty darned good. (the reason I mention OFED and rpm in this yum rant is that when I finally get to build working OFED RPMs for SuSE, yum will sometimes silently fail to install them… mysteriously …. then I have to resort to an rpm -Uvh … which works just fine).