OT: Apt-get vs YUM?

[Kevin Kofler]

Jiann-Ming Su <sujiannming <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Yum is great for RedHat based system.  Apt is great for Debian based systems.

And apt-rpm is great for Red Hat based systems too. ;-)

Some people (e.g. me) like it better than yum, for several reasons:
* because they're used to it. Not a great criterion in principle, but one which 
does come up in practice. ;-)
* speed. That's not so much an issue these days, and yum might actually be 
faster now due to the sqlite metadata. (XML sucks, it's slow and memory-hungry 
to parse.) Panu Matilainen is working on adding support for sqlite metadata to 
apt-rpm though, the latest development version has it. But back in the day (see 
the first bullet ;-) ), apt was way faster.
* better handling of broken dependencies: apt-get dist-upgrade can 
automatically remove packages which have broken dependencies (of course it asks 
first!), and apt can also do a partial upgrade if some of the packages in the 
updates repository have broken dependencies. With yum, you'll have fun with 
manually removing packages in the first case and --exclude in the second.
* different (arguably better) multilib handling. When you install a package on 
a multilib system, yum defaults to pulling in both versions of the package, 
apt-rpm defaults to only pulling in the 64-bit one. Which behavior you prefer 
is a matter of taste. (Proponents of one way of handling it usually call the 
other "broken". ;-) )
* Synaptic. A great GUI frontend for apt.

        Kevin Kofler