What's all the hype over Ubuntu?

[John Summerfield]

Ian Chapman wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>>> But I must admit, I never really understood that viewpoint as yum has 
>>> basically eliminated "dependency hell" and wondered what was 
>>> magically different about deb.
>>
>> Try to find something that isn't included in the standard repository. 
>> With fedora, you won't even find the names of additional repositories 
>> documented, so you ask here.  You'll get several different answers and 
>> if you are looking for Sun Java, none of them will apply.  For 
>> anything else, like vlc or the Nvidia driver, you add all the 
>> recommended repos and tell yum to install something and you'll get rpm 
>> conflicts.   With ubuntu, you enable the pre-configured extra 
>> repositories, pick what you want and you are ready to run it.
> 
> So it seems it's more about packaging strategy and what distros offer, 
> rather than debs necessarily being inherently superior to rpm. I can 
> understand what you've said in the context of Fedora and Ubuntu but Suse 
> offers much of the same "non-free" stuff. Maybe Mandriva too I can't 
> remember. I'd always assumed they were referring to the days when you 
> tried to install program1.rpm which then said it needed libfoo.rpm, 
> which in turn needed libbar.so.1 which you had to figure how which rpm 
> it was in and so on, which is why I thought that viewpoint seemed outdated.
> 

debs have different information, and the ability to have different 
strength dependencies:
requires, like with rpm
recommends - may work better with these
suggests -- may work better with these.

At one point (years ago) I had to install X on RHL to use Ghostscript. 
Complete nonsense of course, but dpkg might have handled that better.

apt-get is about equivalent to yum, but does more such as download and 
(optionally) build source - it can get and install build deps too, it's 
quicker (at least with simple stuff) (at least with default options). 
apt-get (like up2date) can download updates without installing them:
   apt-get -yud dist-upgrade

yum's tools might be equivalent, but it's a terrible mish-mash. AFAIK 
there's no proper equivalent _in yum_ to the above apt-get command which 
fetches all available updates and copes with adding new packages - it's 
not only for release upgrades equivalent to f8 to f9.





-- 

Cheers
John

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