apt-rpm - regular updates wouldn't be a problem if redhat used it

Posted Jan 28, 2003 10:02 UTC (Tue) by ahornby (subscriber, #3366)
Parent article: Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

The main problem with redhat upgrades is that there online tools (e.g. up2date) are pay-for and only support patching, not release upgrades.

I've been using apt-rpm from Fresh RPMS for a while now, which doesn't have these problems.

Apt-rpm provides a free solution, with an open back end (so that you can publish your own packages - for example gstreamer use apt-rpm in this way) and works really well. The alternatives, up2date and red-carpet, have closed back ends, you have to get redhat or ximian to publish your package for you.

Perhap we would go to Red Hat Bugzilla and raise enhancment requests to ask for this?

apt-rpm - regular updates wouldn't be a problem if redhat used it

Posted Jan 28, 2003 14:11 UTC (Tue) by utidjian (guest, #444) [Link]

"The main problem with redhat upgrades is that there online tools (e.g. up2date) are pay-for and only support patching, not release upgrades."

This is NOT true. I wish people wouldn't keep saying it. I have several dozen systems running Red Hat, I use up2date, and I haven't paid them a dime to use it. It IS a "free" service. However... if you want faster performance you will have to pay a subscription. I see no problem with that.

I also maintain a local mirror of the updates. I am planning to move my updateing system to Autoupdate. http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/autoupdate/index.html
so I can save my external bandwidth for regular use.

It is also "free" to do release upgrades. However, one usually does those as all or nothing. While I can install and run many Red Hat 8.0 RPMs on a 7.3 system (and vice versa) I usually don't. One can even do release upgrades over the network... or even the internet. That has been possible with Red Hat since, at least, Red Hat 4.2.

-DU-...etc...

apt-rpm - regular updates wouldn't be a problem if redhat used it

Posted Jan 28, 2003 15:47 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Regular updates would still be a problem for Red Hat. It takes a week to QA a release with 1-2 developers and 3-4 QA engineers in most cases going through the various versions of the OS, the various hardware setups, and the various standard layouts to make sure that problems havent cropped up.