There's more to Package Manager's than this!
Posted Sep 25, 2003 15:55 UTC (Thu) by
RobDavies (guest, #9930)
Parent article:
The Great Package Management Experiment
There's other factors that should be considered, this test appears to just
rate based on how many command lines, are needed. It's often useful to
have tools that display choice of packages, some information about them,
and also show what dependencies will be installed.
New Linux users don't ask themselves, "how do I install MPlayer?" but
something like, "how do I play this DVD?". You might want DVD menu
support, in which case it'd be useful to know about alternatives like
Ogle/oKle. Other times you want control of what get's updated, and
explanations of why. Those are strengths of SuSE's YaST package
management and the YOU update system, which address concerns of server
admin's who dislike blind updates. You can choose security updates only,
or choose to ignore very recent updates, to allow others to test, and not
risk stability of your system. I've no experience with Mandrake's urpmi,
so I cannot make compare that. Debian's, RedHat's, and Gentoo, updating
don't/didn't make selectivity as simple, or provide patch descriptions in
as quick a way.
The YaST errors on installation source are inevitable, if you put in a
URL, that isn't a YaST format repository. Secondly some of the links have
incorrect or out of date information. YaST/YOU does support HTTP for
instance, and has had command line capability (but you had to RTFM). As
there are 3rd party SuSE rpm distributors perhaps they'll make their
offerings work seemlessly with YaST in future.
SuSE are still using the retail box sales model, with (free as in beer)
ftp install probably a less common option. Changing to the rolling
target, of net based distro's, like Debian and Gentoo, might be
commercially problematic. There's no single right way, it's good to have
alternatives which meet differing requirements.
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