apt vs yum vs rpm vs deb..?

Thomas DuVally tduvally at brown.edu
Thu Oct 30 14:03:51 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 04:53, greg wrote:
> so far i've lived my life in the sheltered world of rpm and up2date.  is
> there a nice writeup anywhere anyone is aware of that does justice to
> apt vs apt-get vs yum vs rpm vs up2date vs alien, rpm vs deb, and the
> advantates and dangers in choosing amongst, even mixing and matching
> amongst them?
> 

I have at some point used all of these, so I will give you my $.02

rpm: Red Hat package format, part of the LSB and used in a lot of other
distros

deb: Debian package format. used in debian an it's variants.

alien: package conversion tool.  Can make an rpm a deb and vice-versa as
will as tgz.

apt-get, yum and up2date: these are all package management tools. They
can download, check dependencies and install packages. Aptis used mostly
with debs, but has been ported to use rpms.  Yum and up2date are for
rpms. They are seperate tools, but (please correct me if I am wrong)
they can/are used together with the up2date system.

Analysis:
I've only been using the up2date and yum since the launch of FC, so I
can't be sure if the troubles are really the tools or the young state of
the project.

I am comparing them to apt, which has been very stable on my debian
systems. Granted, debian has had a long time to get the processes to
support it right. The apt on fedora has worked well the times I've used
it, but it looks like the "official" management tool will be a
yum/up2date combination.  While I've tried to use it, there are
currently some big problems with it.  I have every confidence that it
will get ironed out, I'm just hoping sooner than later.

Which brings me to my little soap-box. 

I've do not really understand the choice of yum/up2date over apt.  I
have heard the arguements in its favor and I agree with them
technically, debian has great success with apt and I don't see the need
to reinvent the wheel. The debian developers already have a good process
in place for testing, approving and distributing packages that work well
together (with some exception is unstable).  Couldn't that just be
leveraged for fedora?


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-- 
Thomas DuVally
Lead Sys. Prog.
CIS, Brown Univ.
401.863.9466

http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x15F233F6





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