APT the system vs. front-ends [ was Apt dependency hell ]

[Tom Buskey]

On 11/29/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/29/06, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
> > So yes, both apt-get and aptitude use the "renowned apt package
> > management infrastructure", but that infrastructure doesn't
> > necessarilly provide all the logic required to deal with all
> > dependency issues or package manipulation options.
>
>   Ahhhhh.  I see.  Makes sense.  Thanks.
>
>   I will say that I still find apt-get (the tool, not the religion) to
> be superior to yum in several respects.  While it keeps improving, yum
> is still dog slow (no pun intended) for many operations.  apt-get has
> more built-in features, and also has more add-ons, wrappers, and such
> available.
>
>   It would have been nice if APT was what the RPM world settled on
> (especially since RPM support already existed for APT).  Then at least
> we'd only have to worry about dpkg, RPM, and APT.  >sigh<

IIRC the rpm format was created under contract to Redhat by the same
person who did deb and has some improvements.

The OpenBSD and NetBSD (I haven't done enought w/ FreeBSD) ports
systems work very well too.

Solaris doesn't seem to have a central system for addons like everyone
else.  Well, they have sunfreeware and blastwave but imagine deb/rpm
without apt/yum.  The repositories might duplicate Sun's offerings in
the system or Companion CD.  They might conflict with each other - you
get to figure it out.  IMO it's the big flaw of Solaris compared to
Linux/xBSD.  Package/Patch (they're different) management.  Sun is
working on some of it but it's not there yet.  Oh, and apt and rpm are
available for Solaris.  I imagine packages in them have the same
issues as the SysV packages.

When I was working w/ a development group, half of them had ideas
about creating a new cross platform packaging systems.  We dealt
mostly with Solaris but also had Windows NT, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD,
Irix and HP-UX systems we had to provide packages for.  This same
group took apart & rewrote Sun's Jumpstart system to work over SSH and
multiple OS versions so they had some experience with packaging.

I think it's another instance of writing your own
editor/xterm/language/make clone.