RPM

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2012–2024), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with RPM, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

Hard to customize beyond simple cases; basic macros poorly documented2024-02-03
Spent hours searching for format docs, finding only outdated, ambiguous files2023-08-17
Poor docs; had to research cryptic install errors to build a working package2023-08-09
Packaging a simple app was painful; RPM macros are magic and poorly documented2023-03-03
Commenting out code doesn't work as expected due to parsing quirks2020-11-09
Epoch mechanism is confusing because it is hidden2020-07-29
Spec files are a single specially formatted file with weird macros defining build steps, hard to work with2020-03-08
Inconsistent command line with weird switches that are hard to remember2018-11-27
Missing packages and tangled dependencies make installs on production servers fail repeatedly2016-03-18
Can't install packages for local user without sudo or affecting others2015-10-19
Command line tools are confusing, with too many options and unexpected interactions2012-08-04