What's all the hype over Ubuntu?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 19:27 -0700, Timothy Payne wrote:
> ----- 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 in and so on, which is why I thought that viewpoint seemed outdated.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
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> > http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
> >
> > You cannot reply off-list:-)
> >
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> 
> 
> 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. 

You can already use apt-get (and synaptic etc.) on Fedora, as many of
the repos offer apt-configured versions. Note that this is apt with
RPMs, not with DEBs.

poc