Scoring apt-usage on RH and on SuSE [LWN.net]

Scoring apt-usage on RH and on SuSE

Posted Sep 25, 2003 16:50 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
Parent article: The Great Package Management Experiment

Red Hat: you installed apt, called apt-get install mplayer, it worked. Your Score: 8

SuSE: you installed apt, called apt-get install mplayer, it worked. Your Score: 6

I.e., you subtracted 2 points for not being able to locate a YASTified 3rd party software depot for a different version of mplayer. That does also not take into account that SuSE was the only distribution that came with mplayer in the first place.

I think you showed your bias again, thanks for your comparison.

Cheers, Joachim

(Log in to post comments)

Scoring apt-usage on RH and on SuSE

Posted Sep 26, 2003 0:13 UTC (Fri) by ladislav (guest, #247) [Link]

In SuSE's case, I deducted two extra points for technical reasons, which were left out from the article due to space limitations:

1. Installing apt on Red Hat required download and manual installation of only one package (apt), while on SuSE, it required three packages (apt, apt-libs and lua).

2. While installing MPlayer, apt reported that it needed a Java package to satisfy the already installed OpenOffice package. I didn't see the connection between MPlayer and Java, nevertheless, I was only allowed to install MPlayer after installing Java first.

I am sorry if the article seems biased. Like everybody else, I also have my favourite distribution, but I did try my best to be as impartial as possible. If any bias still shows, it's unintentional.

Scoring apt-usage on RH and on SuSE

Posted Oct 2, 2003 17:43 UTC (Thu) by jasonlotito (guest, #15665) [Link]

I'm just trying to figure out why you only reviewed YOU, and avoided YaST. Indeed, you went ahead an installed apt-get for some reason when YaST works fine. In fact, YaST is perfectly capable of handling non SuSE distributed RPM's, such as those from usr-local-bin.

Upgrading is just as easy too. It's just a matter of getting the new CD, putting it in, and upgrading.

Your mark of 6 against SuSE is really just unfair. Great, so SuSE's unofficial apt-get package manager is a 6. But what about YaST, the default, and much better package manager?

Putting this into perspective, Debian would receive a low score because when I tried to install YaST, Debian gave me problems.

Scoring apt-usage on RH and on SuSE

Posted Nov 29, 2003 2:27 UTC (Sat) by agill (guest, #17301) [Link]

"In fact, YaST is perfectly capable of handling non SuSE distributed RPM's, such as those from usr-local-bin."

I was talking to a SuSE employee on IRC and I was told that YaST can't use 3rd party software repositories and that I should try to stick to SuSE provided RPMs or use something like apt for suse. I like to create my own RPMs for certain software and store them on my local ftp server. Could you please provide some links to documents describing how to coerce YaST into displaying my custom software from my local server?

"Upgrading is just as easy too. It's just a matter of getting the new CD, putting it in, and upgrading."

Hmm but what if I want to update a remote server? I don't have anything against SuSE but that's one thing I really like about Debian. Two commands have allowed me to upgrade remote computers from one version of the OS to another.