Do we need this crap on LWN? [LWN.net]

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 21, 2007 17:41 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Do we need this crap on LWN? by evgeny
Parent article: ESR's goodbye note

I don't think that it's a issue with RPM vs deb for package format technical superiority.

From my limited understanding RPM is superior to Deb and it always has been.

The difference is the quality of the packages being made themselves. For a long time third party rpm files were created in a very ad-hoc/loose fasion and that reflected very badly when people tried them.

As for upgrading between releases by doing 'yum update' or 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' is a difference of culture. In Debian this is valuable so they work hard to make sure it works, in Fedora they prefer just to let anaconda take care of the incompatabilities between releases.

I don't think either approach is wrong, although I think that Debian approach has advantages to end users. Then again Debian still hasn't gotten a stable release out and it's been a cronic problem so it's not like Debian's approach isn't without problems either.

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Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 21, 2007 18:31 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

While I agree that the main difference is culture and care, I disagree that RPM is
technically superior. dpkg has the "partially-installed" status, preventing the database
corruption that RPM is famous for.

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 21, 2007 22:29 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ya that is nice.

Plenty of times I've had to cancel a update to a debian box halfway through and to recover from that only took a minute or so of work.

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 20:40 UTC (Thu) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]

FWIW...

The only problems I have had with RPM have been circular dependencies (this not recently). This can, of course, occur with dpkg as well -- it's a problem that is symptomatic of poor packaging, not the package manager. OTOH, I have had issues with dpkg on a number of occasions. In particular, dpkg is not as strict about making sure that everything is going to work, and at least twice I have had failed dist-upgrades that broke the system, because half way through the upgrade dpkg panicked somewhere and left my system half broken. RPM is pretty paranoid in its transaction checks, and will not put you in this position.

Also: dpkg cannot install multiple versions of a package simultaneously. RPM can do that, portage can do that, I don't see why this huge feature has been neglected by the Debian community for years.

A long time Fedora user, I have recently been using Ubuntu because of a few big packages not present in Fedora that would be too onerous to maintain myself. I have been pretty pleased so far, but I still am not impressed with dpkg, especially given the niceties of RPM (and yum).

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 23, 2007 7:52 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

""Also: dpkg cannot install multiple versions of a package simultaneously. RPM can do that, portage can do that, I don't see why this huge feature has been neglected by the Debian community for years.""

I don't understand that and how that works.

In fact it caused major problems for me when I tried to use CentOS that I'd end up with multiple packages installed somehow with no easy way to get rid of them.

Say I have one program that depends on libfoo.3.2 and I have another program that depends on libfoo.3.5 with the libfoo project introducing incompatabilities in their lib files on minor numbers (As many projects do).

Does having multiple packages of libfoo installed automaticly make both programs work? I have no idea.

I mean I've been using Debian for years and I never ever had a desire to install two copies of the same program at the same time...

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 23, 2007 23:28 UTC (Fri) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]

Normally this is used for things that aren't libraries. For example, you might want to have multiple kernels installed, multiple versions of MySQL, multiple versions of Python, etc. I think if you were careful you could do this with libraries as well, but I'm not sure how intelligent RPM would be wrt overwriting symlinks. As it stands, Debian based distributions include the package version as a component of the package name, to get around the limitation. This is why, for example, on Ubuntu there is currently a python2.4 and python2.5 package. In an RPM based distribution there would just be a bunch of python packages in the same repository, and by default the newest one is installed -- if you need an older version and it is in the repository, it can be pulled in by another package's dependencies, or you can specify the version you want to install at the command line. This is a useful feature, and there are yum extensions (e.g. installonlyn) that use it in interesting and creative ways.