What's all the hype over Ubuntu?

[Timothy Payne]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Summerfield" <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>
To: "For users of Fedora" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: What's all the hype over Ubuntu?


> Ian Chapman wrote:
>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>>>> But I must admit, I never really understood that viewpoint as yum has 
>>>> basically eliminated "dependency hell" and wondered what was magically 
>>>> different about deb.
>>>
>>> Try to find something that isn't included in the standard repository. 
>>> With fedora, you won't even find the names of additional repositories 
>>> documented, so you ask here.  You'll get several different answers and 
>>> if you are looking for Sun Java, none of them will apply.  For anything 
>>> else, like vlc or the Nvidia driver, you add all the recommended repos 
>>> and tell yum to install something and you'll get rpm conflicts.   With 
>>> ubuntu, you enable the pre-configured extra repositories, pick what you 
>>> want and you are ready to run it.
>>
>> So it seems it's more about packaging strategy and what distros offer, 
>> rather than debs necessarily being inherently superior to rpm. I can 
>> understand what you've said in the context of Fedora and Ubuntu but Suse 
>> offers much of the same "non-free" stuff. Maybe Mandriva too I can't 
>> remember. I'd always assumed they were referring to the days when you 
>> tried to install program1.rpm which then said it needed libfoo.rpm, which 
>> in turn needed libbar.so.1 which you had to figure how which rpm it was 
>> in and so on, which is why I thought that viewpoint seemed outdated.
>>
>
> debs have different information, and the ability to have different 
> strength dependencies:
> requires, like with rpm
> recommends - may work better with these
> suggests -- may work better with these.
>
> At one point (years ago) I had to install X on RHL to use Ghostscript. 
> Complete nonsense of course, but dpkg might have handled that better.
>
> apt-get is about equivalent to yum, but does more such as download and 
> (optionally) build source - it can get and install build deps too, it's 
> quicker (at least with simple stuff) (at least with default options). 
> apt-get (like up2date) can download updates without installing them:
>   apt-get -yud dist-upgrade
>
> yum's tools might be equivalent, but it's a terrible mish-mash. AFAIK 
> there's no proper equivalent _in yum_ to the above apt-get command which 
> fetches all available updates and copes with adding new packages - it's 
> not only for release upgrades equivalent to f8 to f9.
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> Cheers
> John
>
> -- spambait
> 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
> -- Advice
> http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
>
> You cannot reply off-list:-)
>
> -- 
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list


I'm not a programmer please keep that in mind,  could a mirror be set up to 
use apt?  I used it on RH 7.3 @ Dag, and had forgot about it untlil then. 
But I assume a mirror will need help for free from smarter people than I.