I was wondering why fedora has choosen yum over apt-get

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 21:05, Shahms King wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 10:38, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> 
> Or Obsoletes or Epoch or . . .  Any number of issues that have no impact
> on the software itself.  If I am aware of these issues, I can work
> around them until they are properly Q/A'd as long as I'm not using apt.
> Additionally, apt has had problems with packages that were completely
> correct, simply replacing other packages that have different
> dependencies. Say, replacing ximian packages with the official Fedora
> ones.  Ximian had a newer version of gnome-libs than Fedora Core,
> however, that version was not the one required by the FC packages. 
> Rather than downgrading that one package, apt decided the only way to
> resolve the issue was to uninstall all of GNOME (even the GNOME2
> packages which didn't require gnome-libs at all).  If you think that is
> the "correct" solution, then continue using apt.  I, however, will:
> 
> rpm -e --nodeps gnome-libs
> yum install gnome-libs
> yum update
> 
> and continue on my merry way.

If that's all it took to fix the issue you could've done it by saying
"apt-get install gnome-libs=<whatever-the-correct-version>" to force the
downgrade. Or do "rpm -e --nodeps gnome-libs; apt-get install
gnome-libs".

Note that your solution required *downgrade* of a package, that's
something no depsolver will even consider normally (even if they can)
and it's generally just unrealistic to expect software to automatically
come up with solutions to every imaginable dependency problem (in a way
which satisfies you).

That said, yes, it'd be nice if apt had an "shut up and do what I say"
mode when you're fixing up a system which is completely and totally
busted and apt *could* help a lot if it wasn't so uptight about the
temporary incoherency of the package database.


> I don't even know what you're trying to say here... Removing packages
> when asked to update a completely unrelated package (in the absence of
> "Obsoletes" is complete counter-intuitive and just asking for trouble,
> especially when the default is 'Y' unlike yum).

Since you mentioned this having to do with Ximian ... yep, I know about
the "db4 obsoletes db1" issue but thats really a packaging bug on behalf
of Ximian which they get away with other depsolvers only because there
never happened to be an update to db4 which would've then removed db1
and broken the system anyway.

	- Panu -