Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Sep 18, 2003 15:32 UTC (Thu) by duck (guest, #4444) [Link]

Hello,

as I said - there are hardly any third party repositories. SuSEs yast handles
dependencies automatically, but not if the dependency can not be resolved with the
packages available within known repositories.

Have a look at packman.links2linux.de.

There you will find lots of updated multimedia rpms for different SuSE versions. If you
select one package, YAST is launched and you can install it directly from the web - if
there are no dependencies that can only be solved by installing another third-party
rpm. Since this is hardly the case with multimedia rpms, the feature is not very useful
for these rpms.

Nevertheless, yast detects dependecies, tries to solve them and even allows you to
force the installation of a package. The capabilities are there, but not the repositories.

Cheers

duck

Posted Sep 19, 2003 11:15 UTC (Fri) by RobDavies (guest, #9930) [Link]

Quotes from the article :

"especially a lack of one with the ability to auto-resolve dependencies"

"SuSE Linux is the only major Linux distribution still stubbornly
refusing to provide and support any apt-like, dependency resolving package
management tool"

Talk about rpm based distro's failing to resolve dependencies is riddled
through this article. OTOH, I find no mention of 3rd party repositories,
until your introduction of what you mean by "advanced package manager" in
the comments section. The whole article's emphasis is actually on
auto-depends resolution, so it is natural for the reader to be misled, by
the statements made.

The article should be retracted and replaced with a useful fact based one,
maybe including a discussion on the pro's & con's of 3rd party
repositories. It is now clear that RedHat is in fact the last leading
distribution to add, these features, so the last paragraph singling out
SuSE, should be particularly embaressing, they should receive an apology.

I think the reason why apt4rpm is popular under SuSE is a combination :

1) Media "Buzz", everyone knows apt-get <package> installs a package.
There have not been many (any at all?) articles on the net, about command
line YaST features, probably because it's SuSE specific, and reviewers
traditionally demand and review GUI administration, not fully appreciating
the power of the commandline. YaST's dependency resolution is very, very
old news, so is not reported. User's tend not to read manuals, so even
documented features may be ignored, for some other method which has more
publicity.

2) 3rd party package providers may specify apt, it's simpler for them to
standardise on one format, rather than learn new distro-specific ones.

3) YaST2 has been under constant development since it's introduction in
7.0, the online updating was not initially implemented particularly well,
and SuSE has not emphasised a committed stable repository format, nor
particularly encouraged 3rd party repositories.

Very many commercial server installations, want stability and
accountability for the core set of system features, with a few key
applications installed. Then QA features like cryptographic signing, and
known suppliers of packages, to a known base release, are more important
than convenient add-ons from 3rd parties.

A standardised format for these competing implementations, YaST, uprmi and
yum, might be interesting as an extension to LSB, the initial strategy of
fixed & stable library versions present, appears to be unrealistic and
ignored in practice. As some Debian using readers point out, strictly
adhered policies on library versioning is important.