Fedora's mid-life crisis

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Rahul Sundaram escribió:
> Imtiaz Rahi wrote:
>
>>
>> Only painful thing to me is YUM. RPM packages are good but YUM, Pirut 
>> and others are not good enough.
>> Synaptic is still better to see what updates are available, then 
>> choose one and find out what are the dependencies which are going to 
>> be downloaded and etc.
>
> File RFE's in bugzilla against Pirut for what you want to see. Note 
> that Synaptic is available in the Fedora repository if you really need it
Sorry to step in into this... Most of the times is not about the RPM 
format, but rather the tools to handle it. I have had many reasons to 
complain about YUM and its utilities, but mainly due to the overhead and 
performance hit it incurs in. Not to bash Yum, but I have questioned 
many times if the choice wasn't all that assertive in the begining to 
use it over more efficient ways like apt-get. Sure apt-get has its 
quirks too and mainly it didn't allow for transparent multilib support 
and other conditions where Yum excels, but, I wonder by the 7th release, 
couldn't these deficiencies in apt-get get resolved with the aid of 
Fedora developers instead of investing so much effort and time into Yum 
only to get little to discrete performance boosts?  Again, I don't mean 
to bash YUM, and I see where it has matured (and grown up rather 
nicely), but it is still not quite there... Only an opinion, though.

The times I've filed RFEs for stuff like making pirut to be more 
informative of a variety of things that CLI YUM does (for example, total 
size of download, individual package size, etc) are not mere "cosmetic" 
changes, they have a direct impact in every day's use (for example in 
pup it would help quite a bit to prioritize updates and estimate 
download times). Another thing that NEEDS to get implemented in 
Pirut/pup is a speed meter and a "mirror change" mechanism (just like 
ctrl+c for CLI YUM) to: a) be able to estimate the time of 
updates/downloads and b) be able to switch to faster mirrors when a 
package is getting too slow download speeds. Another proposed feature I 
remember filing was a mechanism to "manage" multiple repositories right 
within Pirut. At most I got an "It is planned" answer, but no status on 
how or when will it be implemented. All in all, the tools are fine, but 
they need much more polish still.