I see that this question has received a bunch of downvotes and close votes, and me wonders what's the issue, other than the fact that it's a cross-post.
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1 Answer
I voted to close on the grounds that it was not a real question: vague, ambiguous etc. I downvoted because (a) it was a crosspost, and (b) the poster only referred to "my distro" rather than specifiying what package manager they were interested in.
Either (a) or (b) alone would not have been sufficient for a downvote, but together they tipped me over the line...
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2I don't see anything ambiguous about it, especially because the answer could easily cover different package managers. This was just fundamentals, nothing needing specific info of this or that package manager (i.e. an answer would apply to any of apt, yum, zypper, pacman). Or, did I miss something?– tshepangCommented Jun 10, 2012 at 23:06
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3Parts of an answer could apply to apt,yum, zypper or pacman... To cover them all it would inevitably be so high-level, with so many exceptions/caveats that it would be less about package managers per se and more about software installation and management. Commented Jun 10, 2012 at 23:11
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@jasonwryan Did you look at my answer? I found the question clear enough...– NilsCommented Jun 20, 2012 at 19:15
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@Nils No, because you answered three days after I downvoted... If you are asking me to reverse my decision, I respectfully decline, for the reasons I have stated above. Commented Jun 20, 2012 at 19:57
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@jasonwryan it is solely your decision. Apart from that most people do not name their distribution in questions here. I wonder why that is...– NilsCommented Jun 20, 2012 at 21:51
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@Nils I'm not sure. I suspect some of them may be new to GNU/Linux and assume that everyone uses $theirdistro... Commented Jun 20, 2012 at 21:56
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1This expectation of a "supreme distro" is one of the most frustrating things about answering "linux" questions. Granted there are big, gigantic swaths of common ground between them. But when it comes to package management and/or installing programs, that is where you have entirely too many differences (sometimes for bad, others for good) between distros. More users need to understand that we can't mind-read them to figure out what distro they're using. Commented Jun 21, 2012 at 23:31
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@killermist But in this case - this was IMHO intended as general question. And interesting enough - I did never run across a book that covers that topic in depth. I had to trace (or look into the scripts for) the update/patch process of each distribution to get to know how it actually works. Even the man-pages don`t actually tell you HOW the update-process works in detail.– NilsCommented Jun 23, 2012 at 21:32
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1@Nils Fair enough. But, personally, I think that if the question was supposed to be "In general, how do Linux distributions handle package management?" then that is how it probably should have been worded. The way it WAS worded, the knee-jerk reaction in my head was immediately "Great, you forgot to mention what distro's package system you wanted detail on..." Often when I'm reacting to a question, I don't really care if it is a "good" question or not, but HOW the question was asked. Good, relevant details go a long way to salvaging a not-great question. Commented Jun 23, 2012 at 22:10