URPMI -- has it improved?

URPMI -- has it improved?

Posted Oct 3, 2003 17:01 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)
Parent article: The Great Package Management Experiment

Last I dealt with URPMI was in the Mandrake 7.2 -> 8.0/8.1 days, and using urpmi was not at all pleasant. The problems I had with it were as follows:

1) Opaque. When a failure occurred, there was no useful or even close to accurate message returned to the supplied gui tool which uses urpmi as a backend.

2) Brittle. The error turned out to be some trivial issue of a runt empty file in the urpmi source lists or some such. It was failing on some kind of incorrect format of a 0 byte file and refusing to continue.

3) Underdocumented. Urpmi had a total of one man page and one readme installed with the default distribution. There were no installed system administrator type documents, nor could I locate any on the CDROM. I was reduced to reading source and running strace/gdb on urpmi to see what it was doing.

4) Layered design unpalatable. This is mostly a matter of taste, and can be fairly levelled at all the systems mentioned, but the secondary layered database of urpmi data inaccesssable from the rpm tool seems undesirable. Is there a reason that one tool can't handle both of these issues? It would be reasonable to have a tool like rpm handle script execution and so forth, but I would rather have the dependency database in one place. Move all the smarts to urpmi if you have to.

All in all, the apt solution seemed vastly more externally usable, documented, and understood by sytem documentation, even if it is an even more confusing layer cake of tools.

Has this changed drastically in the past few years?

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