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.
No comments:
Post a Comment