[NTLUG:Discuss] RPM craziness

[Robert Pearson]

Bryan Smith wrote---
> I'm still scratching my head why Red Hat is preferring YUM.

I have used both apt-get and yum. I prefer yum for user friendliness
but apt-get seems to work better. This could be a mirrors issue. As
usual there is no tool that combines the best features of both unless
I write it myself.
Here is a snippet from Wikipedia preferring yum over apt-get---
===============================================================
Yellow dog Updater Modified
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Yellow Dog Updater, Modified, yum for short, is a package manager for
RPM-compatible Linux systems.

***Its main advantages over the RPM version of apt are its smaller
codebase and better dependency handling.
>Inserted from the yum developers FAQ--- not part of Wikipedia
>
>Support/Questions
>
>Obvious Questions
>
>Q. Why not just use apt-rpm?
>A. a number of reasons:
>
>   1. I didn't wanna
>   2. At the time yum started apt didn't do a number of things I needed and it didn't do a >number of other things very nicely
[---rdp note---] Anybody know where I can find these "other things" listed?
>   3. I wanted to learn python
>   4. yum is relatively pretty and relatively nice and has significantly less legacy baggage >than apt
>   5. Size of codebase in apt (find -name \*.cc | xargs wc -l): 40141
>      Size of codebase in yum (find -name \*.py | xargs wc -l): 4681
>   6. Yum is written in python and therefore can benefit from code theft from anaconda and >up2date - I did indeed steal the lilo updating code directly from up2date and learned A LOT >from anaconda.

**A main flaw is its lack of standard GUIs, although some companies,
such as Cobind, have attempted to rectify the problem.

Yum is the standard tool for updating Fedora Core, and up2date can use
yum repositories to update software.
===============================================================
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Apt-get)

Advanced Packaging Tool, or APT, is a package management system
created by the Debian project. APT greatly simplifies the process of
installing and removing software on Unix systems.

***There is no apt program per se; APT is a C++ library of functions
that are used by several command line programs for dealing with
packages, most notably apt-get and apt-cache.

There are also programs that provide a front end to APT, usually based
on apt-get, such as aptitude, with an ncurses text interface, and
Synaptic, with a GTK+ graphical user interface.

There is a central repository of over 13000 apt packages used by
apt-get and derived programs to download and install applications
directly from the Internet, often hailed as one of Debian's best
features.

***APT was originally designed to work with .deb packages on Debian
systems, but it has since been modified to work with RPM packages via
apt4rpm, and to run on other operating systems such as Mac OS X — see
fink.

The idea in APT is that once package repository has been specified
during the system installation, packages can be installed without
specifying location. APT also handles dependencies automatically.
===============================================================

Looks to me like the RedHat bottom line is---
(1.)  Written to work strictly with RPM, in which RedHat has a huge investment
(2.)  Zero maintenance and support of "libraries", like APT.
(3.)  Small codebase in a very popular, highly extensible language, Python.

I'm sure experienced people already knew all this. I wrote this email
to clarify, in my own mind, whether to use apt-get or yum. Perhaps I
will get some useful feedback from others who passed this way long
ago.

Thanks,

Robert Pearson