Debian flamewar (was: OpenOffice doc...)

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 10:41 -0500, Cole Tuininga wrote:

[snip]

> Furthermore, I was asking questions regarding yum because I have
> interest in learning about it.

  Okay, here's at least some answers.  You asked if yum had the
equivalent of "apt-cache search".  Well, I haven't used apt in a while,
but does what it looks like it does, then, yes, the version of yum
available in Fedora Core 3 has a "yum search" function which will do a
glob and return a list of matching packages.
  You also asked if there were yum repos that have comparable selections
of software to Debian.  Ah, well, that's a tall order to fill ;-).  But,
the biggest two I know of are http://atrpms.net/ and
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/.  Both of them, I think, are both
apt- and yum-enabled.  There's also, of course, the venerable
http://freshrpms.net/.
  

>   Honestly, I'd forgotten about apt for
> rpm (from how little I hear of it, it sounds like it's little used?  Is
> this true?  If so, anybody have thoughts as to why?)

  Well, there are certainly apt-rpm *fans* on the fedora lists ;-).  One
of the problems with apt-rpm, at least historically, is that it was a
real PITA to create the repo from a directory of rpms.  Yum, in
contrast, was one simple yum command (forgot the subcommand -- it's been
a while -- yum now has a separate 'createrepo' command).
  Also, historically, apt-rpm was atrocious performance-wise.  That's
improved dramatically, but explains one of the reasons the leaning was
toward yum when Fedora Core was being conceived.
  And then there is the matter of the language it was written in: C++.
Whatever your opinion of C++, the simple fact is that a significant
portion of Red Hat's tools developers have historically known and been
proficient in python.  Yum is written in python.  That meant it was
going to be much simpler just from an on-going maintenance point of view
to keep it integrated well with rpm and other admin tools within Fedora
Core.
  That's just Fedora Core, of course, since that's my experience.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there has been a common repo
format in development for some time and I think that most of the
depsolver tools will be able to grok it if they don't already.  That's
good news for everybody involved because it means repo maintainers can
just 'createrepo' and have it immediately be accessible via apt-get,
yum, urpm*, up2date and the like.


-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets