[GRLUG] Top 100

[Michael Mol]

On 4/10/07, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> I like apt.  Does anyone think another
> approach is better?   e.g.,  does anyone
> actually like RPM?

RPM is a package manager, like dpkg.  the Red Hat equivalent to apt,
for Fedora, at least, would be yum.

Once I figured out how to get the repositories set up, and understood
how cross-repository conflicts worked, I found I preferred yum over
apt.  It was convenient that it would test all of the transactions
before trying to commit anything, so I wasn't left with any
half-installed package groups.

Being able to search for packages by required file (i.e.
/usr/lib/libxx1) was a big plus...I've found the similar functionality
in apt-file to be unmaintained on occasion.

Finally, getting non-distro-maintained software simply seems to be
easier for RPM-based distros than DEB based distros.  I don't know why
that is.  And, no, alien is not a solution, it is a hack.

The only downside I found to yum was that it updated its package list
every time it was run.  On high-latency DSL, that's a PITA.  And I
shudder to think of what it would be like to try to use yum on
dial-up.

All that said, I'm back on Ubuntu again.  I'll try Feisty when it
comes out, then probably switch to the latest Fedora Core...There are
a few applications I've wanted to run that simply don't work under
Ubuntu for lack of developer/vendor support, such as cinelerra and
Hamachi. (Yes, I've tried to compile Cinelerra from source.  The build
scripts are written badly enough that I wasn't able to fix them.)

-- 
:wq