Smartrpm was (Re: Fedora Core 4)

[Michael Favia]

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Jonathan Andrews wrote:
| Im no novice user - nor an expert, but somebody please tell me what
| yum/up2date has that apt/synaptic doesn't ?
|
| I've been using apt/synaptic against core 3 and im beginning to think
| that yum is a political move not a technical one ?
|
| Sorry if this annoys - im not trying to troll

I am definitely not the most qualified one to answer this question but i
dont mind telling you what i know or have heard. Yum/gyum/up2date were
all written for fedora and for rpm package management. Apt/synaptic have
been ported from debian and have a couple of layers of messiness to make
things work just right (hearsay).

Apt downloads (or did) semi-large digests that contain information about
the packages currently available on the repo (which is updated every
time the repo is updated) this digest is used to determine what is new
and what dependencies exist between packages. Yum (recent versions at
least) on the other hand downloads a brief (read: smaller) listing of
the packages (with some meta data i think but not sure what) and then
fetches the headers of the rpms independently to do dep resolution.

I too was an apt user during fc1 and 2 but in the middle of fc2 i
switched to yum because it is native, well supported and pretty well
feature laden. I have issues with it like i do with most packages (and
package managers) but all in all i consider it a strong utility. My
chief complaint is the absence of a robust GUI interface (GYUM has way
too many caveats for my tastes) that i can give to my novice users so
they can explore the realms of OSS without having to use the CLI (i want
to draw them in to Linux not scare them off with complexities). As a
result i normally install new users with apt/synaptic and use yum myself
because i like to think i know what im doing (if for no other reason
than to track its development).

Please dont take anything i said in this email as fact i didnt do any
research because im lazy and just wanted to share with you the things
that i had been told/found out through other means to provide you with a
starting point for your own research. In short yum seems (to me) to be
the package manager supported by FC and consequently more reliably
depended on for future development and system compliance (at least
internally).

If you think that the selection of Yum is unwarranted i ask you to
remember Beta and VHS tapes. Beta was better but VHS won because of
market acceptance. At a certain point the benefits provided by one
format are outweighed by their scarcity in the marketplace.

- --
Michael Favia            michael.favia at insitesinc.com
Insites Incorporated    http://michael.insitesinc.com
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