yum vs. apt

[Sam Williams]

On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 09:42 +0000, Peter Cannon wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 November 2004 03:15, you wrote:
> 
> > Just curious, Has anyone heard of porting Synaptic to work with yum?
> > May be a horrible idea.
The idea of a graphical front-end to yum is probably not a bad idea for
those that feel more comfortable with a gui interface. I don't recall
the tool name, but Redhat did have such a beast many years back. 

It  doesn't make sense to port Synaptic since it came from the Debian
world and is designed to be more in tune with the apt environment.
Having said that if the UI seems to embody the things that you'd want in
this type of tool there is nothing that says it couldn't be used as  the
basis for a yum based equivalent.
> 
> I think the idea has bean raised there is conflicting advice regarding yum, 
> up2date and apt-get working together some people have told me there isnt a 
> problem apart from having three cache files which can get very large while 
> others state that on no account should all three be run at the same time.

The cache file/directory sizes really are of minor concern. Yes they can
be large, but Fedora is anything, but an embeddable Linux. Generally,
drive space is a luxury on most machines any more.

I have seen some issues using apt / yum on the same system. I understand
what you mean by saying  "at the same time", but perhaps others do not.
You mean on the "same living instance" of the OS, not at the precise
same instance in time. For those that are confused by the statement,
realize that  apt on Fedora still requires the rpm back end, as does
yum. Trying to use more than one of these tools at the same instance in
time will generate an rpmdb lock file error thereby stopping the second
attempt. 

I have seen some issues relating to the problem of having multiple files
of the same name listed in the rpmdb.   Not sure what allows this since
it is not a normal operational mode, but the best I can ascertain is it
may occasionally come  from the use of both tools on the same system.
The warnings and any other issues can be corrected by using rpm -e  on
the warning generating filename. In recent years rpm has become a little
more robust then in previous years  and will allow correcting these
issues in this fashion, without the need for any harsher rpmdb
maintenance efforts.
> 
> With this Dell Laptop I used up2date for the first two days then yum for about 
> a week then, and from now on, I'm using apt-get with Synaptic front end I 
> only had one problem when I enabled ATrpms it wanted to install stuff that 
> was already there?
I personally have never liked up2date. Its a personal bias. Just
remember that NONE of these tools are without problems. I would guess
that at least 95% of the time they will all work pretty flawlessly.

-- 
Sam Williams                                             samurai at acm.org
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