Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 18, 2010 18:56 UTC (Sat) by anshulajain (guest, #70172)
In reply to: Mageia - a Mandriva fork by elanthis
Parent article: Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Mandriva/Mageia has
1. The best control center for configuration- the MCC
2. Probably the best package manager for RPM distros- urpmi (sorry yum is slow as hell and zypper is confusing when clubbed with multiple repos)
3. A KDE which is on as good as, if not better than openSUSE
4. Still the best distro for a newcomer to Linux.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 8:19 UTC (Sun) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link] (2 responses)

"sorry yum is slow as hell"

Do you have an factual comparison for that statement? If not then it would be nice not to repeat this often stated but unsupported rumor. Quite possibly you are not running yum against its cache (ie you are downloading repository metadata each time).

Back to the topic: good luck to the ex-Mandriva people. They've helped the rpm ecosystem a lot.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 22, 2010 13:45 UTC (Wed) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315) [Link] (1 responses)

Quite possibly you are not running yum against its cache (ie you are downloading repository metadata each time).

Yes, using 'yum -C search' or 'yum -C list' is quicker. But, then you can't use 'yum -C install'. So, if you want to install a package, which you *know* has all the required meta-data cached, yum will *always* download the new meta-data, and in many cases, waste more traffic doing that, than downloading the package and its dependencies.

However, besides some defaults which can be turned off with plugins, I still find yum's conflict/obsoletes resolution very poor, compared to urpmi and smart. Since on package renames (e.g. when an upstream project has to change their name, due to fork or trademark issue), on Mandriva usually use provides/conflicts/obsoletes, rebuilding these packages for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS results in working packages, but yum mostly can't figure them out, so for me, use of yum is often in the role of 'download the package from the repo for me, so I use rpm to do the upgrades'.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 22, 2010 14:26 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

". Since on package renames (e.g. when an upstream project has to change their name, due to fork or trademark issue), on Mandriva usually use provides/conflicts/obsoletes, rebuilding these packages for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS results in working packages, but yum mostly can't figure them out"

Since Fedora uses provides/conflicts/obsoletes all the time and yum can figure out just fine, this statement requires a specific reference.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 9:58 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (9 responses)

>sorry yum is slow as hell and zypper is confusing when clubbed with multiple repos

What exactly is confusing, or is it just a limitation of the user? And if you have more than 6 repos, something is usually going wrong.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 11:16 UTC (Sun) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (8 responses)

Huh?
rpmfusion
google-chrome
spot-chromium
adobe
firefox-nightly
official/updates/updates-testing ....

Suddenly it's way more than 6 already, just to try two browsers and have a working flash?

Sorry, I'll bite here and say that "If you have more than 20 you probably have issues" but 6 ought to be standard faire.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 11:38 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (7 responses)

rpmfusion? That does not sound anything like openSUSE.
6 it is for openSUSE: (oss, non-oss, update, contrib, packman, and 1 "free" to choose in case you _do_ miss something). 7 is also still ok iff you need it, but in most cases you don't. If you do, it's a sure sign your package(s) of desire should be included in the base distribution in the next release. (Short of any _development_ fluff like firefox-nightly or packages where the legal section has problems with.)

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 15:32 UTC (Sun) by anandrajan (guest, #146) [Link] (6 responses)

I have about 20 opensuse repositories enabled at the moment and a quick check reveals that I need most of them. Besides the usual 6 (or 7) I have many opensuse build service repositories (OBS) enabled: Education, Banshee, Mozilla, OpenOffice, GNOME 2.20, KDE 4.5, KDE Extra, KDE:Updated Apps, XFCE and Java. Since OBS regularly updates all the apps, I find it very useful. I have zypper/YaST set up to update to the new versions once a week.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 16:01 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (4 responses)

Sounds pretty much like you wanted Factory in the first place.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 16:38 UTC (Sun) by anandrajan (guest, #146) [Link] (3 responses)

Factory tends to break things too much to my liking. Also, I felt that if I ran Factory, I should switch to fedora which I tried but it didn't work out - hence the mix of some reliable OBS repositories along with the usual basic 7.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 16:49 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (2 responses)

But in essence, factory is composed of the submissions from develprojects like the ones you have.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 19, 2010 21:48 UTC (Sun) by anandrajan (guest, #146) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't need all of the updated packages in Factory. The instability problems I mentioned earlier stem from using the latest packages in Factory for everything. By using only certain OBS repositories, I can *automatically* update every package without too many worries. For example, right now I have GNOME:STABLE:2.30 and GNOME Apps disabled - based on some bad experiences - and it'll probably remain that way until the next version of opensuse (assuming there's one). Essentially, I act as a repository filter - bad experiences from certain repositories end up getting those repositories voted down (with priorities assigned values over 100) and then eventually disabled if necessary.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 20, 2010 5:25 UTC (Mon) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

In Debian, you have the possibility to use backports. While probably not that cutting-edge as Factory, you can get a stable system and some fresh applications on top of it.

I'd imagine that something like this might be an optimal use for gentoo, wouldn't it?

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 23, 2010 15:34 UTC (Thu) by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475) [Link]

I completely agree with you. I have 21 enabled. And have no desire to run factory.

I want gcc 4.5, I want KDE 4.5, I need the science, Education repos, libdvdcss has its own repo for some reason, I have a couple OBS repos from people who do research in the same area as me and keep the software up to date. It quickly adds up.

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 20, 2010 1:41 UTC (Mon) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

For real information on yum's performance:

http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumBenchmarks

Mageia - a Mandriva fork

Posted Sep 20, 2010 13:23 UTC (Mon) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link]

"""
2. Probably the best package manager for RPM distros- urpmi (sorry yum is slow as hell and zypper is confusing when clubbed with multiple repos)
"""

Perhaps 2 years ago I'd have agreed with you. The facts are that svidal and team did a lot of work to improve the speed of yum. Some people still don't get that "yum update" is equivalent to "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade". If you want something equivalent to "apt-get upgrade" or perhaps "apt-get dist-upgrade" try "yum -C update".