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Revisiting RPM Package Management

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

The anticipated announcement by Red Hat, Inc. about the future direction of the Red Hat Linux Project, originally scheduled for publishing early this week, was rudely postponed by the imminent arrival of hurricane Isabel in North Carolina. But even as preparations for the potential natural disaster took precedence over writing code, Red Hat still found time to update us on the progress. "We are excited to announce that we are working on an alliance with another well-known provider of Red Hat compatible packages", claims the updated Red Hat Linux Project page. It also promises to release a full announcement, and possibly a new Red Hat beta, on Monday, September 22.

One of the more exciting aspects of this change in direction for Red Hat Linux is introduction of an advanced RPM package manager into the distribution. Traditionally, a lack of one, especially a lack of one with the ability to auto-resolve dependencies, has been a sore point with many users of Red Hat, SuSE and most other RPM-based distributions who often found it frustrating to install or upgrade software. In recent years, many settled on using a third-party application, such as apt-get, apt4rpm or yum, but nevertheless, Red Hat and SuSE's reluctance to provide and support any of them was not appreciated. Luckily, the Linux world is changing fast and Red Hat no longer sees the traditional retail boxed sets as a major income provider. This was possibly one of the reasons for introducing "yum" into Red Hat Linux.

Before we get to explore the wonderful world of advanced package managers, let's take a look at the RPM. Often incorrectly referred to as "Red Hat Package Manager", the abbreviation actually stands for "RPM Package Manager", a recursive acronym often found in UNIX and Linux worlds. "The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating computer software packages.", asserts the rpm.org website. The format was developed by Red Hat Inc. at some point in mid-nineties, when the Linux distribution market was utterly dominated by Slackware Linux and its TGZ package format. TGZ packages were (and still are) nothing more than simple compressed archives of individual files along with a script that places them into correct directories during installation. When RPM arrived, it was seen as a huge improvement over TGZ. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the RPM package format played a crucial role in the dramatic swing in Linux market share - away from Slackware and towards Red Hat. In the following years, the RPM package format was also adopted by SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera, Turbolinux and many other distributions.

As wonderful as RPM was compared to TGZ, it was the non-commercial Debian project which sprinted ahead in the package management game in March 1999 with the introduction of APT in Debian 2.1. APT is a front-end to Debian's own package management with an ability to resolve software and library dependencies. This proved to be a very successful tool and the RPM package manager was soon to be subjected to crude jokes by Debian users and developers. However, they only lasted till December 2000 when Conectiva Linux ported APT to create apt-rpm and incorporated it into its own distribution. Many other RPM-based distributions followed suit and apt-rpm was soon spotted in projects ranging from Russia's ALT Linux to Japan's Vine Linux. Confidence in RPM was slowly returning into the world of Linux users - except for the users of the Red Hat distribution who will have to wait until late this year before they can enjoy supported advanced package management with dependency resolution.

Those of you who monitor the Red Hat beta mailing list or the Red Hat development branch called Rawhide, have already noticed the presence of "yum" among the long list of packages. What is "yum"? "Yellow dog Updater, Modified is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for RPM systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm." Dependency information is extracted from RPM header files, which list library and software requirements, as well as conflicts with other packages. It is simple to use with commands such as 'yum check-update', 'yum update' and 'yum install <packagename>'.

Useful as yum is, many Red Hat veterans have already standardized on apt-get, with its Debian-like commands of 'apt-get update', 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and 'apt-get install <packagename>'. However, apt-get has not been spotted in Rawhide, so those who prefer to use it will have to continue relying on an unofficial version. We have seen very little technical information about Red Hat's reasons for favoring yum over apt-get, but this is something that will no doubt be explained in the coming weeks. Both apt-get an yum are supported by the Fedora Linux community project, which is one of the largest and most popular third-party repositories of Red Hat compatible RPM packages, while the other main repository at Fresh RPMs only provides apt-enabled package sources.

With Mandrake's own 'urpmi' package management and now Red Hat's inclusion of 'yum', SuSE Linux is the only major Linux distribution still stubbornly refusing to provide and support any apt-like, dependency resolving package management tool. How long before it too succumbs to the power of modern software management?

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for September 16, 2003 is out. This week: audio players revisited, which Tcl, package migration to testing, the second revision of Woody, Dueling Banjos, and much more.

Martin Michlmayr talks about the conferences he's been to, a dedicated Opteron machine for Debian, LSB compliance and cooperation with other projects in this edition of Bits from the DPL.

Colin Watson presents Bits from the BTS with an overview of some recent changes to the Bug Tracking System.

Raphael Hertzog presents Bits from the PTS with a look at some new features in the Package Tracking System.

The Debian-Installer team has a new Debian-Installer HOWTO which needs some testing, so check it out.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 37

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 15, 2003 is out. The top news this week - an official port of Gentoo to IA64 is in the works.

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Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter

The September 12 issue of the Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter is out, with coverage of Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite, Mandrake's fifth anniversary, and various other topics.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware has had a very busy week according to the slackware-current changelog, including the addition of slackpkg, a simple apt-get-like tool for keeping a Slackware system up-to-date. Slackware 9.1 beta-1 was released September 12. If you want to grab a copy please consider using a mirror, which can be found at AbnormalPenguin and AlphaGeek.

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Red Hat Linux

The KDE for RedHat project has released KDE 3.1.3(a) RPMs to the stable repository. Get 'em while they're hot.

Red Hat has an updated printer configuration tool which fixes some SMB problems.

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Trustix Secure Linux

TSL has bug fixes available for many packages, including bind, cyrus-imapd, cyrus-sasl, grub, hwdata, initscripts, kernel, make, mdadm, ncurses, postfix, ppp, rp-pppoe, samba, setup, and stunnel.

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Engarde Secure Linux

Engarde fixes a bug introduced in 3.25 version of stunnel, which was released to fix the original SIGCHLD vulnerability, in the new SIGCHLD handling which caused defunct/zombie processes in local mode (-l or -L) on some systems. It also fixes a problem where the accepting socket could hang under certain conditions which is the common method of use on an EnGarde system.

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Minor distribution updates

2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux

2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux has released v1.2.1 (source code) with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: busybox and uclibc were updated. maplay was added. USB, CDROM, and other boot methods were added. Bugfixes were made in the browser. Email requests are no longer available for this distribution due to the number of bounced returns."

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Ark Linux

Ark Linux has released 1.0 alpha9. Click below for the release notes.

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BG-Rescue Linux

BG-Rescue Linux has released v0.2.1 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Support for 3c509/3c529 (MCA)/3c579 "Etherlink III" ethernet cards was added. A Freedos BOOT floppy was added to boot BG-Rescue Linux on systems on which booting with syslinux fails."

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ClusterKnoppix

ClusterKnoppix has released 3.2-2003-06-06-EN-cl1. "Changes: Some debug messages were removed, and the 2.4.21-rc7 kernel and openmosix 3 release were included. knx-hdinstall was fixed to work with boot288.img. Some changes were made to the terminal server, and various scientific tools from Quantian were included."

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Cool Linux CD

Cool Linux CD has released v2.3. "Changes: This release fixes bug with CD mount, changes the default options for more comfortable use, and updates some software and filesystem programs (ext2, XFS, and ReiserFS)."

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Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux has released v0.4.7. "Changes: This release adds parted (a partition tool), rdesktop (an RDP client for Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server), and xpacman (a fun and tiny Pacman game). It updates the Firebird script to 0.6.1, updates lilo, and adds an option to set the frequency for the Xvesa server. There has been a lot of bugfixing and cleanups, fixing some post-install bugs with sudo and swap, cleaning the post-install script, and fixing IRC and screensaver bugs."

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GENDIST

GENDIST has released v1.6.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Support for media type "Bochs" has been added. This allows you to directly create a bootable Bochs HD image. There is a fix for make 3.80, which breaks GENDIST."

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KNOPPIX

KNOPPIX has released v3.2-2003-09-05. "Changes: This is an experimental 3.3 prerelease. Kernel 2.4.22 with xfs and HIGHMEM (4GB) support is included. cloop 1.02 (block layer rewrite). katomic was reinstalled, since it got lost somehow in the past release. New unofficial development boot options were added for testing: toram and tohd=hda1, which copy the CD to RAM or hard disk and runs from there. A "gprs" option was added to pon to provide GPRS Internet access."

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Quantian

Quantian has released 0.3.9.1. This is test version of a 0.4 release, planned for the end of September. Click below for the release notes.

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ROOT Linux

ROOT Linux has released v1.4 beta 1 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release features a new, more advanced package system, lots of installation improvements, general polishing of init scripts and packages, and loads of updated packages."

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Server optimized Linux

Server optimized Linux has released v17.00 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This version uses the SoLIv2 installation system, which features software RAID support, a quick-install mode for automatic mass-installations, and a clear step-by-step installation menu. Servers can be installed within 30 minutes. It also included an enhanced XML boot system, SoL-diag 2.0, which facilitates fast and easy diagnosis of computers, and music from three Austrian bands."

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Distribution reviews

A Free Desktop for Free People (OfB.biz)

Open for Business reviews Mandrake Linux 9.1. "I have been using Mandrake since the 8.2 version. I was a previous user of Red Hat (up to version 7.2), and Mandrake attracted me because it offered features such as the excellent font installer, the apt-get-like urpmi package manager, i586 optimization, a desktop focus with an excellent breadth and scope of packages, user friendliness without dumbing down the system, easy GUI administration tools but with the command-line in full force and readily available should one prefer it, and many other perceived advantages."

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SuSE Linux Professional 8.2 Review (Linux Journal)

The Linux Journal reviews SuSE Linux Professional 8.2. "YaST 2, SuSE's second-generation setup tool, is a total dream. (Keep in mind this is a Debian fan talking here.) The software installer looks very much like the install screen and shows you which CDs you need to use and for how long; I imagine it's much of the same code. The system tool lets you do everything from edit /etc/sysconfig files to back up the system. The firewall tool, under Security, allows for some fairly advanced configuration, including DMZ and IP masquerade, right there under the GUI."

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Is the Leader of the Linux Pack Also the Best of Breed? (ServerWatch)

ServerWatch reviews Red Hat Linux 9. "Red Hat's configuration tools are fairly solid for the basics, and turn up, thanks to their Open Source licensing, in several other distributions: Network configuration, hardware management, printer configuration, and activataion/deactivation of running services (such as sendmail or Apache) are available through these simple but usable tools. In all, Red Hat's GUI is polished and usable for any professional system administrator. Red Hat has put a reasonable amount of effort into its own approach to the Linux GUI, which it codenamed "Blue Curve," and for day-to-day management we have no complaints."

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A distro revisited - Libranet 2.8.1

MadPenguin looks at Libranet. "Libranet has included everything that is important to a solid desktop distro and left out the extra fluff... all the while keeping a truly 'Linux feel' that some other desktop distros have lost. It's a perfect balance and a difficult one to maintain if you ask me. There is a fine line, or rather a large gap, between a traditional Linux system and a true desktop system."

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