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Package management like RPM is an incomplete solution to a difficult and probably unsolvable problem: Dependencies.
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In fact, package management systems like RPM do just one thing: they transfer the responsibility for the consistency of *your* system to *someone else*.
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It depends on what you do with your computer if this is an advantage or a disadvantage. It can save you a lot of work, but it makes you depend to your distributor to provide consistent packages for your system, to a degree, as it is usually more difficult to install packages from source on distros with package management.
If all package maintainers were equally bright RPM and APT and others would really free us from a number of tedious tasks. But: Package maintainers have their own minds, their own opinions and their own way of doing things --- like us. And, in fact, they make mistakes, of course. On the other hand, if they do their job well, they deserve our respect, because making a good package can be a real hard job. Many difficult decisions have to be made, and in the end there will still be one user, at least, complaining, that you did it wrong.
Eg, one maintainer thinks a perfect package won't install if not all the functions in the program are usable. If the program needs an additional library just to set the background colour from green to blue, and that library is not install, RPM will not allow you to install that package. (Except with --no-deps and --force, of course).
Another package maintainer follows a less restrictive approach, allowing you to install a word processor, even if you can't print out anything with it without an additional package.
And, BTW, you can install and use RPM (and probably APT as well) on Slackware, too. If you feel the need. I don't. But I love to have RPM on my SuSE laptop.
gargamel
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