yum and apt differences.

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting "Charles R. Anderson" <cra at WPI.EDU>:

> I brought this up at the time I packaged yum, but there was no
> consensus other than yum should behave the same way up2date did (which
> is why it exludes kernels by default), and root's gpg keyring
> shouldn't be messed with automatically by the package.

Sounds like apt should follow the same rules then, no?

> Does anyone use apt non-interactively, i.e. via cron?

I don't think that is relavent really.  Why would it matter?

> If not, then
> these differences don't matter too much I guess.

Sure they do.  I install apt, run it, and it messes with my root user's
key ring.  It doesn't even tell me what it is doing to it, just that it
is changing it.  At least I'd like to know what it is doing, if it's
going to do anything at all.

> I view apt as a
> nicer user interface, more featureful sysadmin tool to be used
> interactively, not as an autoupdate mechanism.

I don't see how that matters.  So, you say to do updates, hope you notice
that one of the updates is a kernel update.  You don't know what that means,
or if it will squash your custom kernel, etc.  (Does it upgrade the kernel,
so it removes your old one?  Does it make the new kernel the default boot
kernel?  Does it upgrade obsolete modules?) So you have no choice but to
abort the whole thing (AFAICT) and then change the apt config files
(hopefully you know where they are, how to change them, etc), and then
restart the hole update.  (Or just roll the dice and see what happens)

I guess I would sum it up as:  If Red Hat didn't have enough faith in
an automatted update of the kernel, then why should we?  If we're supposed
to change as little as possible for compatability with previous behavior and
to avoid surprises to the admin, then shouldn't stick with the way Red Hat
did these kinds of things?

--
Eric Rostetter