Package management

Package management

Well, I'd rather not see this topic get any farther into the package management wars... by contributing to this discussion... BUT... I do think your "many minutes" is an exaggeration. The only time I've had yum take more than a minute was when I was building an OS Template with OpenVZ... which is akin to a complete distro install. For normal, day to day operations, yum usually only takes a few seconds. I run my own repos and it is impressively fast sometimes... although yeah, apt would shave off even more of the install time. I think a lot of the lags that people have with yum are related to the mirror sites being slow... but I don't really have any data to support that.

Regarding the apt vs yum thing... and the term "rpm hell"... it is mostly about the packages themselves rather than the package manager. No one has really been relying directly on rpm for some time (just as Debian users don't use dpkg too often) with up2date, yum and others layered on top of rpm. I do give the Debian package maintainers credit as I think their packages have less problems... not that Fedora packages have lots of problems... but Debian has so many packages that Debian users don't go outside of the distribution provided packages as often as Fedora (or other rpm based distro) users do.

There was an article in LWN weekly a while back talking about some new package management system on some distribution, I forget which... but it was claiming that rpm development was dead because there hadn't been a lot of activity... but somehow he totally overlooked yum and the plugins for it that seem to be multiplying... but I didn't want to reply to that at the time because I didn't want to sound like I was an apologist. It just isn't cool when people use an article about one subject as a platform to advocate or slam another.

Ok, so if something I've said urks whoever reads this... don't take the bait... talk about the topics of the article rather than engaging in package management wars. :)