sound. Use what you know and like and what works for you whether it is the
need to be standard with home and work or otherwise. I would say the same
about the W OSes. I think that more people should use Fedora. I would except
I like all of the packages Kubuntu has and the openness of PPAs, although
purists see them as a problem.
I agree with others that Packagekit is not great, but what is? I always
default to Synaptic because it just works, even though I use KDE. Or I use
apt-get. Ubuntu's Software Centre is a classic case of what is wrong with
package managers today. They simplify to the point where you get no relevant
info. You get all the glitz and hype (ooh, look, it has four stars) but you
can't find out what dependencies it needs and what changes to your system
will be before it does its work. If you are like me (Heaven forbid) and
don't want something in particular (I am picky) Software Centre will install
it anyway. You could even end up with Mono (that is a disease in both
senses, IMO) and not know it or install Evolution when you don't want it
because it is part of ubuntu-desktop. You have no way of knowing whether is
is Mono-based, GTK based or Qt based because Software Centre is not going to
tell you. The reall absurdity is that it does not allow you the ability to
refresh or update the package list. You need to rely on a separate
application, Update Manager, to do that.
I prefer Yumex to Packagekit in Fedora and always go back to it. It is the
best of a bad lot, IMO. I used RPM way back when RPM Hell was a real problem
(Mandrake). I know how bad it was and it is nowhere near as bad as that. I
don't seem much difference in the ability to handle dependencies than DEB,
but that does not get RPM distros off the hook. There are some real problem
in some of the front ends (with the exception of yum which I like). I hate
SuSE's implementation. Mandriva is okay. I really like PCLinuxOS, but that
uses apt-rpm and Synaptic. The general lack of standards is an annoyance.
You can move from one Debian distro to another and the skills are
transferable. Not so with RPM distros. Unfair! ;)
I think that Scott is right that Presto is designed to save bandwidth and go
easy on the servers. For people on dial-up that could be important. I don't
even know what that is like anymore as I have been on broadband since it
first came out, although my introduction to online was through BBSes and on
the internet before www, but that seems like another lifetime ago. It is
hard to identify. I have lots of relatives in rural Canada which is the
second largest country in the world and very spread out (the population of
California) and none has dial up. I don't know why the US is so far behind.
It is certainly no more remote. It must be political because we are very
different in that respect. That is my rant for today. :)
Roy
Using Kubuntu 10.10, 64-bit
Location: Canada
On 1 December 2010 10:01, Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 08:25:58AM -0500, Roy wrote:
> > I agree about yum being much improved and on par with apt. The biggest
>
> > problem with rpm distros is there is no uniformity. SuSE uses Yast/
> Zypper,
> > Fedora uses Smart and Yum, RedHat uses up2date, Mandriva uses urpmi, but
> > last I heard they were switching to something else. To confuse things
> > further PCLOS uses apt-rpm and Synaptic. Whereas all Debian distros use
> apt
> > and dpkg. The commands are the same across all Debian based distros. That
> > makes rpm harder to get to like and learn.
>
> Smart isn't the default, and one has to go to some effort to set it up.
> RedHat, and its clones, Oracle, CentOS, Scientific, and of course,
> Fedora, which is no longer a clone, use yum.
>
> I haven't used the others in awhile--I do know that their packages
> aren't usually compatible with each other, and I don't know how
> difference the uses of yum are between them.
>
> >
> > I will add to that my recent experience with F14. I had several package
> > managers installed, Packagekit, Yumex, Smart and Add /Remove and I could
> not
> > get all of them to work from the same database. I would update in Yumex
> and
> > then Packagekit would say it could not find the database and update which
> I
> > had done just seconds before in Yumex. So I would rebuild the database
> but
> > it would still only work in Packagekit and another one would break. At no
> > point could I get all four to work. Not only that it would update the
> > package list twice, before I installed an application and afterwards,
> before
> > I had a chance to quit Yumex. It seems very touchy and antiquated to my
> > thinking.
>
> Yumex has, unfortunately, become almost defunct in favor of packagekit.
> Packagekit, may, one day, be something good, at present, its developers
> have done things such as allow all installs and updates with no
> authentication---this slipped by people because the majority use command
> line and also because, in testing, packages are unsigned and it only
> applied to signed packages. After this made the front page of slashdot,
> they changed it, but he left it so that upgrading required no password,
> which made it into RH beta. I think it was Jeff's mocking this to his
> friend at RH that got it fixed.
>
>
> >
> > Presto seems like a good idea, but it does not save any time because it
> > spends much time calculating changes and testing them when it could be
> > installing. It does save bandwidth if that is important to you.
>
> True, it doesn't save time, due to the rebuild, however, bandwidth is
> the aim, I believe. On the other hand, these days, if you're on
> limited bandwidth or dialup, not sure if Fedora would be the distro with
> its frequently upgrades.
>
> I use it because for the majority of us in the IT industry, the jobs are
> RH based, and at my age, will probably stay that way till I retired.
> Your assessment doesn' sound overly harsh to me.
>
> > The advantage of Debian over RPM used to be stability, but as mentioned
> RPM
> > is stable now. The advantage now is that Debian is more uniform and
> simpler
> > to use. It also has far more packages because Debian maintains such huge
> > repos. The best RPM distro in my experience has roughly half the number
> of
> > packages that Ubuntu has.
>
> If one combines rpmforge and a few other 3rd party ones, I'm not sure.
> RedHat itself, aimed at the enterprise, has relatively few, even when
> compared to Fedora.
>
> > When there is so much talk about having one package manager to rule them
> > all, it seems that RPM must first get its act together and agree on some
> > standards before they could hope to present RPM as a viable alternative
> to
> > DEB.
>
> I think the eventual aim of PackageKit is to be able to handle both and
> any other formats as well. I don't see too many religious arguments
> over it, nor do I see RH trying to make themselves the standard, at
> least in the everyday, vs. the business, world.
>
>
> --
> Scott Robbins
> PGP keyID EB3467D6
> ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
>
> Xander: Hi, for those of you who just tuned in,
> everyone here is a crazy person.
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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