Seeking new maintainer for apt and synaptic

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Hans de Goede wrote:
>
> Axel Thimm wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> apt/synaptic have been orphaned since about half a year, anyone
>> objecting in me taking over?
>> 
>
> Not really an objection, but do we want to confuse users with an extra way to 
> manage repositories. Also APT AFAIK still doesn't handle multi-lib.

Like others have pointed out, the lorg releases do support multilib and 
lorg3-rc1 in extras-development also supports the new repodata format.
Nobody wants to see the "depsolver wars" rehashed, and there's really 
nothing to rehash. People have different needs and like to use the tool 
that suits their needs best, shrug.

> Is there any significant reason to use apt instead of yum? Don't get me wrong 
> choice usually is good, but this is a very fundamental piece of the distro, 
> and becoming so more and more. We also have only one kernel, C-library and 
> X-server and with good reasons.

There are various reasons people want to use apt. To name a few:
- If you're in mixed .deb vs .rpm environment having the same tool for
   both types of systems can be useful.
- Apt does some things that yum doesn't (and this is of course true the
   other way around as well), and will not, according to Seth,
   support. Remember all people on fedora-devel complaining about rawhide
   brokenness on a given day and having to figure out long --exclude=<foo>
   command lines for yum to work around them? Apt does that automatically
   by holding back updates to packages with broken dependencies, for
   example.
- There are people who like apt because of it's insane configurability.
- It works across entire rpm release line (3.0.5-4.4.5 at least), current
   yum and smart do not (and no, yum 1.0 doesn't quite cut it :)
- Speed of dependency resolution (apt doesn't download any additional
   headers for example)

Oh and before more people ask: me hacking apt-rpm again does NOT mean I've 
stopped (or planning to do so) working on yum+yum-utils.

 	- Panu -