dependency tool for RedHat

Paul Iadonisi pri.rhl1 at iadonisi.to
Thu Aug 7 21:05:30 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 16:31, seth vidal wrote:

  Hello, Seth!  Thanks for developing yum.

[snip]

> Well I'm the yum developer and you'll note I made an addendum to my
> reasons for not using apt-get on the yum webpage. I can no longer claim
> they are reimplementing a lot of things. Though some of it is still the
> case.

  I hadn't looked at the home page recently, so I hadn't noticed that. 
I will say that in a recent update using synaptic against freshrpms.net
I noticed a *dramatic* speedup, so maybe that was when a lot of the code
was cleaned up.

> I'll also note my reason for putting that list up there was to get
> people to stop telling me to just use apt. I have nothing against apt,
> I've talked with a number of apt developers and they are very bright and
> have a working program.

  I wasn't really implying that apt was bad.  In fact, I had assumed
that the main reason for the speedup mentioned above was that this at
least some of that cleanup had taken place.  I will say, and this
probably has nothing to do with apt, per se, that synaptic has a really
bizarre UI layout.  It would probably fail to most of the HIG
recommendations.  Nonetheless, it's probably a good starting point for a
gui for apt.  At least as far as I know, there is *no* gui for yum.  Is
anyone working on one?

[snip]

> 
> 
> This concept is commonly called pinning - it is available in apt but it
> is 1. underdocumented and 2. not trivial for the complex cases or simple
> cases.
> 
> We've fleshed out some options for doing this in yum and it will be
> something I'll be working on for 2.5 and above.
> 
> 
> >   But I should definitely be able to do this at the package level so I
> > could, for example, be able to specify a list of packages (Gnome and
> > company) to get only from the Ximian repository and never get them from
> > the Red Hat repository.
> 
> The tricky part is that it is very easy to get your system fairly
> seriously hosed if you mix-and-match a bit too much. Just b/c everything
> resolves correctly in rpm-land doesn't mean it's necessarily all
> correct.

  Yeah, and that's what contributes to the 'rpm dependency hell' that is
the perception of many.  Or sort of related in the rpm thinks everything
is hunky dory, but in reality, it's not.  I understand the problem...the
solution is another story.  The sheer volume of software available makes
this problem all the more difficult.

-- 
-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





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