"apt" to eventaully replace "rpm"?

Chris Jones jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk
Sun Nov 25 15:53:48 UTC 2007


> I've used both.  I LOVED apt.  It was FAST.  I mean real fast.  I 
> actually preferred it to yum.  It had a sweet GUI interface, and 
> searches were quick.  I could use it for for bringing-in packages as 
> stated, but it worked well as a local package manager too.  It was an 
> all-in-one solution.

I'm with you there. APT is much faster than yum. The gui you are 
thinking of is probably synaptic, and I agree its probably the best 
package manager GUI I've used.

> 
> Yum became the Fedora/RedHat standard, as I recall, due to apt not being 
> able to differenciate between architectures; i.e., if I wanted to 
> install the current *.i686.rpm kernel, apt couldn't distinguish between 
> that and a *.i386.rpm kernel.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but it was a major 
> issue that prevented apt from working under Fedora correctly.

I think this correct - Not only i386/i686 but more importantly multilib 
- i.e. having both the 32bit and 64 bit versions of some packages at the 
same time. That was some time ago and I do wonder if ubuntu/debian have 
not solved this by now - Surely they have a need to do the same thing 
over there ?

Also, I think APT doesn't handle multiple mirrors for a single repo as 
well as yum, but I might be wrong here.

cheers Chris




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