urpmi and Mandrake (and the Mandrake community)

urpmi and Mandrake (and the Mandrake community)

Posted Sep 18, 2003 20:48 UTC (Thu) by ranger (guest, #6415)
Parent article: Revisiting RPM Package Management

It's interesting how good ideas seem only to be noticed when they are adopted by a large company ...

Firstly, in your article, you discuss apt4rpm and yum, but only mention urpmi in passing.

You noted that apt made it's appearance in Debian in March 1999. urpmi made it's appearance in Mandrake's stable release in 7.0 (IIRC), which was in early 2000 (at least 6 months before apt4rpm). urpmi is more functional than apt4rpm, and there have been an ever-increasing number of features and improvements. urpmi now has key management (allowing you to assign keys to certain urpmi media - in essence trusting certain identities for certain packages) and retreival, support for small transactions, support for parallel installation on multiple hosts. urpmi has been capable of the much-touted "apt-get dist-upgrade" since at least 9.0->9.1 (I did a number of upgrades with no problems), and updating to 9.2 will now be trivial (no more difficult that with apt on Debian- many of the same issues apply though).

Secondly, now that Redhat is suddenly more "community oriented", they get all this coverage for a decidedly bland page (mostly listing mirrors), while Mandrake has had cooperative development, with active involvement of the community for a significant time.

We don't see anyone mentioning the cooker wiki, or the fact that a number of important packages in the main distribution are maintained by non-Mandrakesoft-employed community members (note that addresses @linux-mandrake.com are addresses for community members, addresses @mandrakesoft.com are for employees).

Also, you will notice with the release of 9.2 that a lot of Java packages are available for the distro, thanks to the efforts of the Jpackage project. We could also mention the PLF.

Redhat still has a long way to go before they have a real development community.

And still we find that news is only news if Redhat does it, for some reason it's not news a year or two earlier when Mandrake does it ...

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