RPM compatibility
 

How compatible are RPMs? Will an RPM listed for Suse 9.1 work with Suse 9.2? Or how about for 7.2?

Will an RPM made for Mandrake work for Suse? Will an RPM work on any system that has the same kernel version?

Obviously, an RPM made for your specific distro/version is best. The farther you get from that, the more likelihood for problems. I have installed RPMs built for RedHat 9 on my Mandrake 10 system and been okay, but there is never a guarantee. :)

Yes, Padma is correct. There is a reason why there are rpms for different versions of the same distro. If an rpm for your version doesn't exist, then you need to compile the software from source. If you take the chance that Padma did (which he got lucky hehe) you might corrupt some libraries which will cause breakage in your system. Trust me, it's not worth that route :).

-twantrd

Dependencies define whether an rpm for a previous distro version will work on a newer one and vice versa. Installing rpms that are not meant for your distro is not very good practice because it can result in a broken system due to the fact that different distros tend to put things in different directories or write configuration files differently. Sometimes things will work fine, but it's always a gamble.

You better believe I was lucky! :D
The way I minimize the gamble, is to research very carefully what goes into the rpm, and what dependencies it has. But it is STILL a gamble! I do it very rarely, and generally only as a last resort. I prefer to compile from source over using a "wild" rpm. :)

To me it would seem that this problem would be a high priority to be fixed with Linux.

Windows may not be very generally stable, but you can run just about any program in Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, etc.

If you compare Windows and Linux in this way you would be making a grave error. Windows uses more or less the same code base with differences in Win95/98/ME and NT/XP and thus most programs will work on previous versions or possibly even future versions. With Linux this is different because each Linux based operatiing system is unique and the only thing that they probably have in common is that they use the Linux kernel and the gnu tool chain.

Actually, most programs I ran in Win95, 98, and ME fail to work in Win2000 or XP. ;) I have to buy *new versions* that are compatable. (And "compatability mode" isn't. ;) )

So as long as you are within the same distribution the RPM should work then?

In theory yes. However, even installing/upgrading the correct version for the rpm things can still break as libraries will get updated and if some applications require this specific version library then uhhh....you know the answer. But most of the time it will work. I have came across very very few times in updating correct rpms that have caused problems.

-twantrd

Not necessarily because if you try and install a Suse 9.2 package on 7.2, it probably wont work coz it would be reliant on other newer packages that are not available on 7.2. If however you try and install a slightly older package on a newer distro e.g. one made for 9.1 on 9.2 it may work fine, but it just depends on what the package is.

Actually reddazz is correct. Sorry, I thought you meant same version distro not just distro.

-twantrd