Yum/rpm sucks, belongs to a system with a very bad management in files and directories. We have a fine object oriented system, lets make use of it.
So start rewriting all these ported stuff to native OS/2 apps. Mozilla, OpenOffice, QPDFview, VLC, SMplayer to name only a few of them. Yoop I think you're dreaming of times where we could use OS/2 the way it was designed and neglect this times are over more than 15 years now. If you want use ported stuff you've to live with their annoyances to some extend.
DLL's which belong to the program should be installed within the directory structure of that program ..... Only DLL's for general usage by every program should go there.
That's the usual approach for ported stuff too. But sometimes it's not easy to decide which dll will not be used by another program. Moreover often some dlls will be reused by another program afterwards what the initial developers could not foresee in the first place. Just to give some ideas that the whole dll issue is way more complicated as some people think off.
Additionally we do have this very bad shared mem problem on our platform. So we have to reuse (share) dlls as much as possible. Building matching dlls for each program and distribute it in the programs directory and let every program use the special version of the dll would work for other system where these shared mem problem do not exist. But unlikely not for us.
Moreover, if I install it I know were what is put down, if YUM/RPM does it for you just say some prays.
If you're the one who do not forget anything you're the lucky one. But numerous complaints, tickets and threads prove that the majority of people do not remember that they f.i. installed gcc442.dll in some program directory years ago. They do not even fire up pmdll or similar tools to find out which dlls are necessary nor do the make a search with f.i. 'which -lasu xxxxdll' to find which dll will be used. They do not understand when which copy of a dll is loaded and unloaded nor the consequences of libpathstrict. They only complain that program x 'does not work' or 'does only work sometimes' or simply 'sucks'.
I've installed yum/rpm on my programs partition p: and 'SET UNIXROOT=P:'. So I've no problem with my system partitions. I can use my programs from different eCS partitions without problems with this setup. yum/rpm works for me most of the time flawless. There where some problems which where repaired after I opened a ticket at netlabs or discussed directly at irc channel. Like all our currents software yum/rpm lacks of development and test time AND users who are willing to work with it and give FEEDBACK and create tickets if necessary.