Hi I see that you are using Ubuntu v5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) as your official distro for the install fest. What advantages does if have over the latest Fedora? As a newbie, I have some experience with Red Hat and Fedora but have never used Debian which I believe is the basis of Ubuntu. Cheers John
On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 16:36 +1200, John Torrance wrote:
Hi
I see that you are using Ubuntu v5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) as your official distro for the install fest. What advantages does if have over the latest Fedora?
The main reason Ubuntu has been chosen over Fedora is that the vast majority of experienced users in the group who have volunteered to help with the InstallFest are Debian users and we are best able to help with a Debian based distribution. Fedora/Ubuntu both have their strengths are weaknesses, the decision has been made, please let this thread not descend into a distro war. Regards -- Matt Brown matt(a)mattb.net.nz Mob +64 275 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu.. Once you get used to apt youll realise how nice it is, and Ive never had much luck with a Fedora upgrade between versions, but fedora has very good reports.. no reinstalls .. just change the repositories and do an upgrade and it all magically stays working ;-) _____ From: John Torrance [mailto:jtorrance(a)ihug.co.nz] Sent: Sunday, 24 April 2005 4:36 p.m. To: wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: [wlug] default distro Hi I see that you are using Ubuntu v5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) as your official distro for the install fest. What advantages does if have over the latest Fedora? As a newbie, I have some experience with Red Hat and Fedora but have never used Debian which I believe is the basis of Ubuntu. Cheers John
Most people point out the benefits of apt when they talk about Debian. May I point out that Fedora by default now uses yum which is very similar to apt for package management. You can also install apt if you like. I use apt and synaptic for my own package management on Fedora Core 3. I think what most people mean when they refer to apt is actually the Debian package repository (that apt accesses). Debian has one of the largest community driven package repositories out there. Frickin huge. There is currently no central official Fedora repository like this. There are a number of very good 3rd party ones. Probably the largest would be the Dag Weirs, Freshrpms, NewRPMS, combo. Hopefully soon to be collectively known as RPMForge. But these repositories still pale in comparison to Debian's. Also in the Fedora world you have to pick your repositories carefully. There are others out there but often they are not compatible with each other because they duplicate packages and do things "differently". Still, these repos cover 99% of what I need on my FC3 Laptop. Also, please note that Ubuntu != Debian. You can not insstall Debian packages on Ubuntu. You have to use Ubuntu's package repository. Fortunately they appear to have mirrored and rebuilt most (if not all) of the Debian universe. Regards On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 20:56 +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Once you get used to apt youll realise how nice it is, and Ive never had much luck with a Fedora upgrade between versions, but fedora has very good reports.. no reinstalls .. just change the repositories and do an upgrade and it all magically stays working ;-)
-- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
Oliver Jones wrote:
Most people point out the benefits of apt when they talk about Debian. May I point out that Fedora by default now uses yum which is very similar to apt for package management. You can also install apt if you like. I use apt and synaptic for my own package management on Fedora Core 3.
While people talk about apt, it's not really apt thats the great thing. It's the ability to think "I want <foo>" and one command later it's installed. It doesn't matter what <foo> is, it's probably in debian somewhere. The package will be high quality, it will work out of the box to the point that it doesn't actually occur to you that it might not work. There will be manpages for every executable, (even if that man page says "the documentation is in /usr/share/doc/packagename/index.html"), debconf might ask you a few questions to help do basic setup of the package if you want to save you having to worry too much about whats going on. Since every piece of software on your box is probably in the package management system, you can be sure it will have security bugs fixed etc. While apt is a piece of the puzzle, it's the only concrete part of it that you can talk about. The repositorys have great coverage, only extremely obscure software won't be in debian. The debian policy means you get extremely high quality packages. Apt means that all of this is trivial to manage from a users PoV. Saying apt is what makes debian great is like saying flying makes aeroplanes great. While a paraglider does meet the requirement of flying, what's important is where you're going and how quickly you'll get there, flying is fun, and the obvious difference over a motorcar it's not the important part of why you are in a plane in the first place.
While apt is a piece of the puzzle, it's the only concrete part of it that you can talk about. The repositorys have great coverage, only extremely obscure software won't be in debian. The debian policy means you get extremely high quality packages. Apt means that all of this is trivial to manage from a users PoV. Saying apt is what makes debian great is like saying flying makes aeroplanes great. While a paraglider does meet the requirement of flying, what's important is where you're going and how quickly you'll get there, flying is fun, and the obvious difference over a motorcar it's not the important part of why you are in a plane in the first place.
I agree entirely. The great thing about Debian is the project not the tools or the package format. The tools are just the enablers for end users. The last thing I want is for Debian to go away (even as a Fedora Core user). What I want is my distro of choice (Fedora) to get as good as Debian in the package repository and package building areas (we already have the user end package management tools thanks to Debian ;). Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 23:45, Oliver Jones wrote:
I agree entirely. The great thing about Debian is the project not the tools or the package format. The tools are just the enablers for end users. The last thing I want is for Debian to go away (even as a Fedora Core user). What I want is my distro of choice (Fedora) to get as good as Debian in the package repository and package building areas (we already have the user end package management tools thanks to Debian ;).
I suppose that I should start by making the almost-obligatory declaration that I do not wish to start (or continue) a distro-war.......<g> I am puzzled by this debate. Why is package management such an issue? In my preferred distro (Slackware) installation and/or upgrading seems, for the most part, to "just happen". I seem to have remarkably few problems, and "dependency hell" is becoming a distant memory. I use "slackpkg" to upgrade, and it is simply a matter of entering a minimal amount of text, and walking away for some time (I have a 56k dial-in connection). It isn't that I am expecting very little from my computers: I run the almost all the usual stuff - Open Office, various graphics packages, email/web-browsing, programming tools, MP3/DVD players plus three packages which have been, in one way or another, quite problematic on other distros from time to time. These packages are: GRASS, R, and LyX. All three work perfectly on my slack-boxes. Am I missing something? regards, ********************************************* Dr Denise J. Bates, School of Geography & Environmental Science University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland New Zealand E-mail: d.bates(a)auckland.ac.nz Telephone 09-3737599 ext 86592 *********************************************
I am puzzled by this debate. Why is package management such an issue? In my preferred distro (Slackware) installation and/or upgrading seems, for the most part, to "just happen". I seem to have remarkably few problems, and "dependency hell" is becoming a distant memory. I use "slackpkg" to upgrade, and it is simply a matter of entering a minimal amount of text, and walking away for some time (I have a 56k dial-in connection).
It isn't that I am expecting very little from my computers: I run the almost all the usual stuff - Open Office, various graphics packages, email/web-browsing, programming tools, MP3/DVD players plus three packages which have been, in one way or another, quite problematic on other distros from time to time. These packages are: GRASS, R, and LyX. All three work perfectly on my slack-boxes.
Am I missing something?
I remember the times before package management. I used to use Slackware 3.6. The first Linux I ever used. After installation from CD (or floppies) you were on your own. No nifty tools to upgrade versions or patch bugs. You could run the setup tools and install something still on the CD but that was about it. When you wanted to install a new application that didn't come with your distro you had to download the source and build it yourself. This ultimately became a nightmare. Especially if you wanted to uninstall something that had sprayed itself all over /usr/local and didn't have a 'uninstall' make build target. Or if the application required a different version of a library you had already installed. Modern package management systems relieve us of the need to build things from source, and allow us to easily install, upgrade and remove applications at will. All the hard source building and compatibility work has been done for us by people who enjoy (or get paid for) that sort of thing. This has greatly reduced the amount of work a system administrator has to do. But like everything, package management systems are not perfect and differ in many ways from each other. Hence the endless debates about .deb vs .rpm, apt vs yum, etc. However if you think about it we should actually just shut up and kiss the ground package manager authors, and package repository builders walk on because they truly are a god send. For example, just today I set Synaptic to download a couple hundred megs of updates to fedora core 3 (+ additions) from a variety of different online RPM repositories and didn't even have to think about whether my configs would be fiddled with, or whether the new library versions would conflict with currently installed apps or anything. Hallelujah brother. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
* Oliver Jones <oliver(a)deeper.co.nz> [2005-04-26 12:35]:
No nifty tools to upgrade versions or patch bugs. You could run the setup tools and install something still on the CD but that was about it.
curl ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt man upgradepkg
When you wanted to install a new application that didn't come with your distro you had to download the source and build it yourself. This ultimately became a nightmare. Especially if you wanted to uninstall something that had sprayed itself all over /usr/local and didn't have a 'uninstall' make build target.
man checkinstall Also: make install DESTDIR=/tmp/makepkg man makepkg
Or if the application required a different version of a library you had already installed.
Package managers can’t make that any easier. Centralized package repositories can. In short, you can very well do without any dependency management, without a large package repository, building stuff from source, and you can still have package management, and get all the vital benefits, though not all the convenience. Regards, -- Aristotle
On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 21:16 +0200, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
* Oliver Jones <oliver(a)deeper.co.nz> [2005-04-26 12:35]:
No nifty tools to upgrade versions or patch bugs. You could run the setup tools and install something still on the CD but that was about it.
curl ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt man upgradepkg
Sure, now there are tools. I'm not so sure abouts 9 years ago though.
In short, you can very well do without any dependency management, without a large package repository, building stuff from source, and you can still have package management, and get all the vital benefits, though not all the convenience.
Sure. And distros like gentoo are entirely source based and have great tools to facilitate building & upgrading etc. I wasn't talking about today. I was talking about the past where these tools didn't exist or were not as well known. Also, I was a newbie back then and have much to learn about Linux. Installing and running Linux is a very different experience these days. Much more newbie friendly. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 15:00, Oliver Jones wrote:
Sure, now there are tools. I'm not so sure abouts 9 years ago though. ... Sure. And distros like gentoo are entirely source based and have great tools to facilitate building & upgrading etc. I wasn't talking about today. I was talking about the past where these tools didn't exist or were not as well known...
(Everybody but our correspondent is talking about now of course :-) The last time an Olivarian thread surfaced it took Aristotle a Debian release cycle to recover. IIRC, 'The Craig' pointed out, in jest, that the lug didn't claim logical consistency in its conversations - or something like that. Now he will need to give temporal consistency the boot as well. Loving it ;-) Sid.
* s swami <sns(a)paradise.net.nz> [2005-04-27 06:10]:
The last time an Olivarian thread surfaced it took Aristotle a Debian release cycle to recover. IIRC, 'The Craig' pointed out, in jest, that the lug didn't claim logical consistency in its conversations - or something like that. Now he will need to give temporal consistency the boot as well.
Loving it ;-)
Okay, I read this six times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. Confutalations, Sid. :-) Regards, -- Aristotle “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you don’t take life seriously enough.”
On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 17:45, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
* s swami <sns(a)paradise.net.nz> [2005-04-27 06:10]:
The last time an Olivarian thread surfaced it took Aristotle a Debian release cycle to recover. IIRC, 'The Craig' pointed out, in jest, that the lug didn't claim logical consistency in its conversations - or something like that. Now he will need to give temporal consistency the boot as well.
Loving it ;-)
Okay, I read this six times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. Confutalations, Sid. :-)
On a second reading, I hardly understand it myself! It was my pathetic attempt at humour. I'll try to parse it: 1) An Olivarian thread requires the involvement of the esteemed Oliver Jones. Only he seems to have the knack of making a thread his own (perhaps in his own image). One may liken it to a QWAN [1] and many of us wluggers secretly do covet it. 2) "The Craig" refers to Craig (long suffering secretary). 3) "he" in the last sentence of my paragraph refers to Craig (not you). The last time a genuine Olivarian thread surfaced, it caused you some dismay as you show in the 4th paragraph from the /bottom/: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug/2004-June/005155.html To which Craig replied (very roughly along the lines I mentioned) as the next message in the thread. 4) We've missed you on the list of late so I mischeviously connected your absence to the violence to which your delicate sensibilities were exposed in named thread. Not the case of course! This was all in jest and the man himself sits back shaking his head at our attempts to plumb the depths of Olivarian QWAN :) Anyway this and my previous mail should get the crap-of-the-month award. [1] For those who might not have come across QWAN: "Quality Without A Name" as used in the "patterns" community. Cheers and apologies Sid. -- prophet of no things Olivarian
I'll try to parse it: 1) An Olivarian thread requires the involvement of the esteemed Oliver Jones. Only he seems to have the knack of making a thread his own (perhaps in his own image). One may liken it to a QWAN [1] and many of us wluggers secretly do covet it.
I do tend to mouth on a bit at times. ;)
The last time a genuine Olivarian thread surfaced, it caused you some dismay as you show in the 4th paragraph from the /bottom/:
http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug/2004-June/005155.html
Crikey that seems like a long time ago. I barely even remember writing it, and reading it again now makes me shudder at my own self righteousness.
This was all in jest and the man himself sits back shaking his head at our attempts to plumb the depths of Olivarian QWAN :)
As Craig pointed out in his own lovable way in the follow up to the June 2004 post, much of what is said on the WLUG list is pure stream of consciousness. Rarely is it ordered or even logically sound. These are probably traits that many of us, certainly I, picked up as Hamilton BBS users/sysops (ah the memories), and besides, the contradictions and posturing is what makes it interesting. :) These are supposed to be friendly Linux related discussions, not debates. We are the WLUG, not the Oxford debating society. For future reference, I tend to write what I think or feel at the time. I'm an instinctive "gut" thinker. Rarely do I sit there and work out reasoned logical arguments. This puts me at the emotional end of the geek spectrum rather than the logical & analytical end. Aristotle (who I don't think I have ever met personally) strikes me as one of those logical & analytical types. A very smart person in his own right who points out many valid things whenever he posts. Though, due to our different personality types it is not surprising that we occasionally butt heads. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:56:16PM +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Ubuntu - desktop Debian - server or desktop Debian upgrades very nicely, I've never used Redhat and don't intend to until I hear that "dependancy hell" has been resolved. James.
James Clark wrote:
On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:56:16PM +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Ubuntu - desktop Debian - server or desktop
Debian upgrades very nicely, I've never used Redhat and don't intend to until I hear that "dependancy hell" has been resolved.
The so called dependancy hell is not really there at all.... YUM/smart/apt provide the same dependecy resolution as you would find in debian. The dependancy hell problems come to light with 3rd party apt/YUM repos, Fedora extras should help fix that once its been completed, but this is no different to 3rd debian repos that people setup and poorly build. Mike
The so called dependancy hell is not really there at all.... YUM/smart/apt provide the same dependecy resolution as you would find in debian.
The dependancy hell problems come to light with 3rd party apt/YUM repos, Fedora extras should help fix that once its been completed, but this is no different to 3rd debian repos that people setup and poorly build.
I actually find the Fedora Extras repository no where near as responsive as the other 3rd party ones like Freshrpms. After FC2, FC Extras seemed to wander off into the wilderness. The community aspects of the FC project are in definite need of serious resuscitation. The only one that seems to be functioning well is Fedora Legacy. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:56:16PM +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Ubuntu - desktop Debian - server or desktop
Debian upgrades very nicely, I've never used Redhat and don't intend to until I hear that "dependancy hell" has been resolved.
James.
_______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior
Personally I've never had a problem with package dependencies. Other than a very trivial amount of annoyance that some things on my server require Xlibs to be installed. Mainly because things, like ImageMagick, have X11 components to them when they can otherwise be used in a headless environment. The problem of dependencies is not restricted to Redhat. It is rather more to do with the way Unix/Linux applications are built with things like auto{make,conf}. When you run configure before you build an application it checks to see what libraries and what not are installed and builds a binary around those discoveries. Not all configure scripts are created equal. Depending on the source code and developers you may or may not be able to build parts of an application without the X11 libs or some other library dependency (via switches to configure). To run the compiled app you need to have the libs it linked against during the build, otherwise it will not start. Those libs are provided by package X, so you package Y has to have the package dependency of X. X in turn might depend on Z and so on. This is normal. This is how all Linux packaging systems work. The criticism that can probably be justly leveled at RedHat is purely a matter of granularity. RedHat has historically only split packages into 3 groups, base, base-devel, base-libs. Eg, cups, cups-devel, cups-libs. Over time, and subsequent distro releases, some packages have been split (where they can be) into smaller chunks, eg php which has some of its extensions split out into separate dynamically loaded modules. But to do this required frucking about with the way php is built. Even PHP which is designed to have dynamically loaded extensions requires jumping through hoops to make it build right in a modular fashion. So, basically the only way to get packages with less dependencies is to create them with a finner granularity. Which means more packages. Which also means much more work building package scripts and testing them. It may also mean writing patches to applications so that they can be built in a more modular way. Not all apps are as good as Apache when it comes to building extensions. Some applications rely entirely on what they 'discover' during the running of configure. To avoid these discoveries would require building entire build environments around those specific applications and each specific module, or creating huge patches which fundamentally change the way an application is built. RedHat has historically gone with the thinking, more packages == more work, more debugging, and slower releases. Therefore lets create less packages and do it faster. Just look a the glacial pace of development in the Debian world for proof. I personally am perfectly happy to install a bunch of extra packages, when necessary, to get things to work. Especially now when we have groovy tools like apt and yum to solve and download all the dependencies for us. So stop bitching and actually give Fedora/RedHat (or any other RedHat derived distro) a try. Regards On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 10:42 +1200, James Clark wrote: oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 02:55:18PM +1200, Oliver Jones wrote:
RedHat has historically gone with the thinking, more packages == more work, more debugging, and slower releases. Therefore lets create less packages and do it faster. Just look a the glacial pace of development in the Debian world for proof.
You mean the glacial pace of the release of stable. I do agree that the next stable release is long over due, every 12-18 months would be great. Hopefully the newly appointed DPL makes a difference. Testing is fairly up to date, and works well. (Yes, I understand the security risks.)
I personally am perfectly happy to install a bunch of extra packages, when necessary, to get things to work. Especially now when we have groovy tools like apt and yum to solve and download all the dependencies for us.
I'm not, the distro's core package management should take care of this. Debian and Gentoo both do (though I'm not a fan of waiting for things to compile).
So stop bitching and actually give Fedora/RedHat (or any other RedHat derived distro) a try.
Bitching? I'll get round to it in time, I just don't have the need to yet as I'm very happy with my distro of choice ;) I'll probably give ArchLinux a go when I next feel inclined to tinker. James.
You mean the glacial pace of the release of stable. I do agree that the next stable release is long over due, every 12-18 months would be great. Hopefully the newly appointed DPL makes a difference.
As an aside, some people have suggested that Debian stay how it is, never release, and let people like Ubuntu, UserLinux, Progeny, Libranet, Lindows etc do the releasing for them. Being that UserLinux is waiting for sarge to go stable, they don't seem like the best candidate, but if Debian were to remain a big meta distribution and let other people package and polish for different purposes it could eliminate some of the current criticism of the rift between Ubuntu and Debian. I don't think a world with no Debian releases would do anyone any good though. I like the idea of a 12-18 month release cycle, similar to RHEL, and keeping Ubuntu at 6 months. The problem with GNOME's 6 month releases is that at the moment, each year has ~6 months of development time and ~6 months of freeze. Having the development outside of Ubuntu (in Debian Sid) neatly addresses that. People can break it however they want, and Canonical will tidy it up at freeze time for packaging.
I'm not, the distro's core package management should take care of this. Debian and Gentoo both do (though I'm not a fan of waiting for things to compile).
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. We had huge problems with FC1 at last years installfest, in that yum downloaded a single .hdr file for each package in the respository. While very small, each file was overhead and the process was tedious. yum 2.2 addresses this by having a single packages archive file which you download, similar to Debian's Packages.gz file. (I know entirely too much about Debian repositories this weekend.) Craig
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
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.
True not a full fork. But they still modify the distro for PPC platforms with different kernel features and some Apple/PPC specific helper packages.
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.
True.
I wouldn't call yum a wrapper as it works with rpm through rpm's python API.
True. But then rpm is a C interface to the RPM libs. Rpm can also download files over HTTP too... Try rpm -Uvh http://site/package.rpm sometime.
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
Indeed. You can even graph the dependencies with rpmgraph and graphviz.
required dependecy, this was not in rpm 3.x and old. Not to mention the transaction support that rpm now uses to support rollbacks.
Indeed the repackage/rollback support in RPM 4 is very cool. For those who are not familiar with it here is a brief synopsis. When you specify the --repackage option to rpm during an upgrade it will repackage the installed files in an RPM (including modified configs) and put the rpm in /var/spool/repackage (all configurable via .rpmmacros). It also records a history of all package maintenance by date. So you can then go "rpm -Uvh --rollback '2 hours ago'" and rollback packaging commands. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7034 for a good howto article. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
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.
Or more correctly up2date's "back-end" was modularised. For RHEL it still uses XML-RPC etc to talk to RHN. For those with FC it can use yum, apt, (or something else you invent, it is written in python after all). I would imagine it wouldn't be hard to add a Red-Carpet back-end to up2date. Personally on FC I prefer to use apt but only because you can use Synaptic and a lot of repositories prefer to go the apt way rather than yum.
We had huge problems with FC1 at last years installfest, in that yum downloaded a single .hdr file for each package in the respository. While very small, each file was overhead and the process was tedious. yum 2.2 addresses this by having a single packages archive file which you download, similar to Debian's Packages.gz file.
That was indeed a nice upgrade to yum. For those who don't like to compete you can always give Smart a go. it is a "grand unification project" for package management. It can install rpm, deb, Slackware tgz, and has a nice GUI. Or so I hear. I've not used it. :) Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
I personally am perfectly happy to install a bunch of extra packages, when necessary, to get things to work. Especially now when we have groovy tools like apt and yum to solve and download all the dependencies for us.
I'm not, the distro's core package management should take care of this. Debian and Gentoo both do (though I'm not a fan of waiting for things to compile).
dpkg doesn't take care of the dependency resolution any more than rpm does. It is apt that does the magic. And yum comes as default on RH/FC. It is almost as good as apt. Apt is very easy to install if you want it. Or you could use Smart... Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 10:42 +1200, James Clark wrote:
On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:56:16PM +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Ubuntu - desktop Debian - server or desktop
Debian upgrades very nicely, I've never used Redhat and don't intend to until I hear that "dependancy hell" has been resolved.
I'm in the process of creating an automatic Ubuntu "server" install CD (see http://www.wlug.org.nz/UbuntuRemastering for the details, if you're interested), and am really happy with my choice of distribution so far. The machines which will be replaced are all Debian Woody machines, which are packed up to the eyeballs with backports to get useful new functionality. The Ubuntu team do more visible work on the desktop packages, sure, but if it comes to a choice between either Sarge or Sid (which are moving) or Hoary (which is stable in one of the Debian senses), Hoary seems to be the right choice. The most obvious problem is "what do I do in 6 months?" Options include "upgrade to Breezy" (obvious, but hard to roll out to many production machines etc), "upgrade to every second release" (not a bad idea), or simply "don't upgrade until security runs out (18 months)". While I don't think security applies to the 'universe' component of Ubuntu, where the big bad Debian repository is, most of the stuff you need is in main, and as time goes on and more people join the project, more stuff will end up in main. In the extremely unlikely (and really bad) event of Debian also moving to a 6 month release cycle, we would realistically have the same problem. As orj has pointed out, there really is no such thing as dependency hell on Fedora any more. The big problem I have on my Fedora (MythTV) box is based on political decisions of the packagers; ATrpms packages lots of new updated (backported, if you want) packages for FC3, which get dragged in in order for me to use MythTV. [1]
Also, please note that Ubuntu != Debian. You can not insstall Debian packages on Ubuntu. You have to use Ubuntu's package repository. Fortunately they appear to have mirrored and rebuilt most (if not all) of the Debian universe.
You can install Debian packages on Ubuntu; what I wouldn't do is add an apt source, because if for example you added an apt repository that tracked sid, you'd get all the newer packages from Debian Unstable pulled on top of Ubuntu Stable, which you don't want to have happen. You can get around this with apt's pinning mechanism. For example, I want the w32codecs package from the marillat Debian repository on Ubuntu. I don't want anything else from that archive. In my /etc/apt/preferences file: Package: * Pin: release o=Christian Marillat Pin-Priority: 1 You can see the relative priorities with "apt-cache policy /packagename/" - locally installed packages are 100, and new packages on a standard repository are 500. Therefore, only packages from marillat that aren't in Ubuntu (eg. the aforementioned w32codecs) will get installed, as the packages installed locally are at a higher priority, even though they are at a lower version. orj is right with respect to the Universe component. The only things I've dragged in from outside Ubuntu itself are some very bleeding Mono stuff to run Beagle, and the win32 codecs. In an amazing show of coolness, Ubuntu does NTFS _AND_ MPPE encryption for PPTP in its out-of-the-box kernel, which were often my first two addons for any new Fedora kernel. Craig [1] Now you've read this far, yes, I could probably get around that with apt pinning. :)
I'm not overly familiar with the advanced features of apt (like Pinning). I have a ipw2200 (Intel Pro Wireless 2200) in my Laptop. The only RPM I've found is provided by ATrpms. But since ATrpms tends to conflict something chronic with the RPM Forge repositories I don't have it in my default apt sources setup. How can I selectively include packages from ATrpms with apt? Regards
In my /etc/apt/preferences file:
Package: * Pin: release o=Christian Marillat Pin-Priority: 1
-- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com
participants (11)
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A. Pagaltzis -
Craig Box -
Denise Bates -
James Clark -
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Kyle Carter -
Matt Brown -
Michael Honeyfield -
Oliver Jones -
Perry Lorier -
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