Craig Box wrote:
Debian's core package manager is dpkg. It does not do any more dependency resolution than rpm does.
Since RH7-ish, Red Hat has had 'up2date', a wrapper around rpm in a similar vein to apt-get being a wrapper around dpkg. yum came from Yellow Dog Linux, a PPC fork of Red Hat, and when it became better/more popular and RH made RHN a paying customers only thing, yum was imported into Fedora and up2date does its updates off yum servers.
YellowDog isn't a fork. A fork would imply a move away from the original code base on which is was based, this is not the case. YD is a PCC respin and sold/support commerically. YD releases are often shortly after Fedora's. YD used yup (YellowDog Update Program) and Yum (YellowDog Updater, Modified) was initailly developed by Seth of Duke University. Up2date and Yum share a lot of the same code as they have both borrowed from each other. I wouldn't call yum a wrapper as it works with rpm through rpm's python API. Also, rpm 4.x does some dependency resolution without the help of tools like smart, apt, yum, urpmi or up2date. If you rpm -Uvh *.rpm is a directory with a bunch of rpms, it will install them in order of required dependecy, this was not in rpm 3.x and old. Not to mention the transaction support that rpm now uses to support rollbacks. Mike