Debian user, seeking advice about Fedora's package management options

[Paul]

Hi,

> 1 - Of the package tools that are now offered for Fedora (rpm, yum, 
> up2date, apt?, red-carpet, others?), which ones are able to 
> automatically get the package from the net? Which ones automatically 
> also get the dependencies? Which ones who me a list of all of the ones 
> that are available (like Debian's aptitude or the dreaded dselect)?

yum. Set it as a cron job and let it do the rest.

> 2 - I tried up2date once. It seemed like it was headed down the right 
> track of addressing the issues that I had with RedHat in the past, 
> regarding automatic downloads from a central source. 

There are plenty of mirrors now :-)

> However, it 
> *seemed* as though it was merely getting security-patched releases of 
> selected packages. For example, if I had installed Foo 1.0 and Bar 1.0 
> with the release CD, and then a new version of Foo (1.1) comes out and a 
> security-patch for Bar (1.0.1) comes out... it seemed that up2date would 
> only get the Bar 1.0.1. 

Foo would come out after a while. It's unusual for it not to.

> In short, you're still stuck with the old 
> versions and their old capabilities, unless there is a security issue or 
> serious bug that needs fixing. Contrast this with Debian, where I can 
> point my apt sources.list file to the "unstable" store and I've always 
> got the latest releases of everything (except major version-number 
> changes. 

I'd rather not go down that road, my views on Debian are well known and
you have stated that you don't want a religious war on here ;-) Suffice
to say, if you don't want a package, --exclude=<package-name> will
ensure you don't get that package.

> 3 - With Debian, there are oodles of packages available on the official 
> site and mirrors. 

Ditto Fedora. Pile upon piles of them. They just aren't held on the
Fedora servers, which is the difference. freshrpms & fedora-extras are
just two of many such places.

TTFN

Paul
-- 
"I don't know how World War III will be fought, but I do know World War
IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - Einstein
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