On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 08:50 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 08:46:02AM -0400, Philippe A. wrote: > > I would like to know why was yum choosen to be distributed in fedora instead > > of apt-get. I started with apt-get before knowing yum existed and was > > actually delivered with my dist. When I gave yum a try, I was disappointed. > > Its verrry slooow, and it seems not to be doing much more. I've read from > > kde-redhat maintainer apt-get is no longer developped, but other than that, > > what are the main differences between the two tools? > > "No longer developed" is a pretty strong reason. Howver, the killer feature > is that apt-get was at the time unable to deal with multilib systems (i386 > binaries on x86_64). There's actually been some development since then, and > it does have rudimentary support now. It has a "supposed to be functional support" now. > > I don't want to start passionnate debate here. I simply want to understand > > yum better and the reasons motivating the choice of a tool over another. > > Have you looked at the apt-get source code? Yes, .... > It's a very complicated codebase, and the grafting-in of RPM support > didn't help that. Yes, it's pretty dirty and "clutter with Debian centrics". > Yum, on the other hand, was designed from scratch in very readable > Python. This makes it a lot easier to improve, making it a better base > for going forward. A matter of perspective: To me, the decision to base a system tool on a scripted language isn't necessarily clever. Fairly easy to maintain, but very demanding on resources and on package dependencies and rather unstable/error-prone at runtime. Besides this, yum and apt are "just different", each has advantages and disadvantages. Ralf
