[SATLUG] Re: Yum considered harmful for compiling your own software?

[Henry Pugsley]

On 11/2/07, Robert Pearson <e2eiod at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
>
> Maybe we are lucky to have package managers that work as good as they do?
> The two best I have seen are Debian dpkg and SuSE YaST2 and I have
> seen both of them become confused.
> I'm not sure how much difference the "deb" vs. "rpm" database management makes.
>
> OS vendors don't see package managers as "value add" software.
> Certainly not on free OS software.
>

I think the difference between APT and RPM is that APT was built
around dependency resolution, and with RPM it was an afterthought.
This is what pushed me to Debian in the first place .. when I first
installed Red Hat 5.2, my video card was not supported (yay ATI) so I
did not install any X packages.  When the ATI support was finally
built, I tried to install X11 and Gnome.  After fighting through 18
levels of package dependencies and still not having a working X
system, I blew away Red Hat and installed Debian (which is what the
ISP I worked for used).  What's silly is that the Red Hat installer
could handle resolving package dependencies, but after the system was
installed you were on your own.

Yum and up2date are a step in the right direction, but there is still
something not quite right about them.  Yum takes 45 minutes to
calculate a dist-upgrade and it takes APT less than a minute.  up2date
is a little faster than yum, but it seems to get stuck in dependency
loops very easily.  It also does not handle uninstalling dependent
packages.  RPMs themselves are a pain to work with because you have to
use nutty cpio commands to unpack an RPM on a system where RPM itself
is broken.  I've had to use a Debian server with alien several times
to fix an RPM-based system with broken libraries.

-Henry