Ian Chapman wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
But I must admit, I never really understood that viewpoint as yum has
basically eliminated "dependency hell" and wondered what was
magically different about deb.
Try to find something that isn't included in the standard repository.
With fedora, you won't even find the names of additional repositories
documented, so you ask here. You'll get several different answers and
if you are looking for Sun Java, none of them will apply. For
anything else, like vlc or the Nvidia driver, you add all the
recommended repos and tell yum to install something and you'll get rpm
conflicts. With ubuntu, you enable the pre-configured extra
repositories, pick what you want and you are ready to run it.
So it seems it's more about packaging strategy and what distros offer,
rather than debs necessarily being inherently superior to rpm. I can
understand what you've said in the context of Fedora and Ubuntu but Suse
offers much of the same "non-free" stuff. Maybe Mandriva too I can't
remember. I'd always assumed they were referring to the days when you
tried to install program1.rpm which then said it needed libfoo.rpm,
which in turn needed libbar.so.1 which you had to figure how which rpm
it was in and so on, which is why I thought that viewpoint seemed outdated.
debs have different information, and the ability to have different
strength dependencies:
requires, like with rpm
recommends - may work better with these
suggests -- may work better with these.
At one point (years ago) I had to install X on RHL to use Ghostscript.
Complete nonsense of course, but dpkg might have handled that better.
apt-get is about equivalent to yum, but does more such as download and
(optionally) build source - it can get and install build deps too, it's
quicker (at least with simple stuff) (at least with default options).
apt-get (like up2date) can download updates without installing them:
apt-get -yud dist-upgrade
yum's tools might be equivalent, but it's a terrible mish-mash. AFAIK
there's no proper equivalent _in yum_ to the above apt-get command which
fetches all available updates and copes with adding new packages - it's
not only for release upgrades equivalent to f8 to f9.
--
Cheers
John
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