[wplug] RE: YUM-RPM and front v. back-end package management -- WAS: Code 6 Package Manager

[Bryan J. Smith]

"Weber, Lawrence A" <laweber at switch.com> wrote:
> I have use rpm, usually successfully in the past.

A good 97% of people don't use RPM just like 97% of people don't use
DPKG.  In fact, it's a good test to see if anyone has supported a Red
Hat distro in a long time (i.e., at least 6 years now with at least
APT-RPM, the last 4 years with YUM-RPM).  But I didn't think anyone
still used only RPM and not YUM this late in the game -- especially
since the "community" Red Hat Network (RHN) officially switched to it
with Fedora Core 1 (and Enterprise Linux 5 as of this year).

> Finding the desired package on the distro CD's would be the
> problem.

It's under ./Fedora/RPMS in earlier versions, but that changed with
the new YUM-RPM integrated Anaconda release, so it's only one level
down now.  Fedora 7 is where everyone should be at now if they are
running Fedora, solves the whole separate non-sense once-and-for-all.
 Everything is now YUM-RPM.  Everything is now completely community
hosted and maintained (finally, only took 7 releases).

> Haven't tried yum so I don't know if it is any better.

YUM is just a front-end to RPM, hence YUM-RPM, just like APT is a
front-end to DPKG, hence APT-DPKG or even APT-RPM.  ;)

I've been using APT-RPM ever since Connectiva ported it over, and
many third party distros started supporting it -- circa Red Hat Linux
7.2.  I even did entire distribution upgrades with APT-RPM.

I switched to YUM-RPM as of Fedora Core 3 because I started running
x86-64 and APT-RPM didn't support multi-arch then (I was ignorant
that it had added support until recently, as someone pointed out on
the Fedora Marketing list).

The only other package manager I use is Smart Package Manager (aka
SmartPM aka Smart), not surprisingly from the Connectiva guys that
originally created APT-RPM (and now funded by Cononical, the
commercial entity behind Ubuntu).  It's in Fedora (Extras prior to
Fedora 7).  It is a front-end for virtually all major systems
(YUM-RPM, APT-RPM, APT-DPKG, SlackAPT, Red Carpet, etc...) and has
two things I love:  Better resolution logic and several interfaces,
including GUI (looks/acts like Synpatic) as a standard program.  The
only thing I don't like about Smart is that it doesn't read YUM repo
config files (at least last time I checked it didn't).

> yumex is apparently not installed.  

Yumex is just a GUI for YUM, but not part of the YUM project itself. 
There can be disconnects between its implementation and the YUM
installed, hence why I prefer Smart.

But YUM-RPM is here to stay as the default in Fedora and all
Fedora-based distros (including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red
Hat Network itself), so it's best to learn it.

Especially when things like ...
  # yum localinstall /export/local/localpkg-1.2.3-1.i686.rpm

Make dependency hell a thing of the past (although it's not
completely removed).


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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