Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 16, 2020 1:30 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Changing CentOS in mid-stream by nknight
Parent article: Changing CentOS in mid-stream

> They used their economic power to hijack a community brand

*snort* It was not a "community brand", it was owned by the founders of CentOS. There was no "hijacking" either; CentOS could have politely told Red Hat to get lost. (And if they had, CentOS probably wouldn't have survived another year, not because of reprisals, but because the CentOS folks were already quite burnt out and were having major problems getting code/updates shipped)

Meanwhile, Red Hat's "economic power" is the only reason CentOS (and Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux, and ClearLinux) ever existed to begin with. Ya know, that whole "binary RHEL rebuild" thing.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 16, 2020 3:31 UTC (Wed) by nknight (subscriber, #71864) [Link] (17 responses)

Keep justifying your defeatism and Red Hat worship to yourself however you like. I’m done entertaining you.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 16, 2020 3:43 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (16 responses)

> Keep justifying your defeatism and Red Hat worship to yourself however you like.

Um, you're the one being all negative here, but whatever...

> I’m done entertaining you.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 16, 2020 9:40 UTC (Wed) by nknight (subscriber, #71864) [Link] (15 responses)

Dude, really? *Really?* Of course I'm negative. You think I should show *positivity* for a change I want *reversed*? WTF? If I had no hope that Red Hat would make a change for the better, I would never have spoken up to begin with, never told them what a catastrophic effect it's having on us. I'm done speaking up on it now, because it's obvious it won't change, but for a few days I held out hope. Now it's fucking gone. Happy?

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 17, 2020 23:27 UTC (Thu) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link] (14 responses)

Welcome to APT, it's nice here. There's a supportive community here. There's actual community here.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 17, 2020 23:48 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (12 responses)

You've left a number of apt-praise comments here, so I'll just pick this one to reply to.

As an outsider, every time I interact with the apt suite of tools I find myself confused and searching the Internet because I can't remember which tool I need to install to answer my query or even ask a simple `--help` about. It makes me really happy to have dnf as a frontend to my package management. Maybe someone could write a simple dnf-like tool in front of dpkg and finally kill off the apt mess, but who knows. That still wouldn't help alleviate the nightmares about trying to untangle dpkg creation tools and recipes and am much happier with .spec files, but that's a different thing.

(FWIW, I started with Fedora Core 5 using apt-rpm until yum was useful enough to ignore it.)

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 1:42 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

> As an outsider, every time I interact with the apt suite of tools I find myself confused and searching the Internet because I can't remember which tool I need to install to answer my query or even ask a simple `--help` about.
There's one tool you need to know: apt (and apt-file). It can do everything.

There's no need for dpkg shenanigans.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 14:54 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (9 responses)

What, really?

Just yesterday I needed to know what had installed the file /etc/OpenCL/vendors/mesa.icd

The command to find that on Ubuntu is "dpkg -S /etc/OpenCL/vendors/mesa.icd". On Fedora it is "rpm -qf /etc/OpenCL/vendors/mesa.icd"

I don't think "apt" or "dnf" handles that at all.

There are actually a lot of things the higher level apt or dnf commands don't do.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 15:15 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (7 responses)

> I don't think "apt" or "dnf" handles that at all.

This isn't true for dnf. yum/dnf has whatprovides and if you don't have the package installed and want to query against the repository metadata, you can use dnf repoquery (with yum, repoquery was a separate tool shipped as part of yum-utils).

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 15:35 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (6 responses)

If apt doesn't do it, apt-file certainly does.

Many Red Hat users have got used to using dnf/yum - in the case of yum, that's a third party contribution to Red Hat.

dpkg -S queries at the same level as a raw rpm command

apt will do much of what you want. In some circumstances, you might want apt-file. apt-cache search foo is also useful and apt-cache is included in apt. [First came deity, then apt-get, then aptitude with a superior solver for package dependencies, then apt - the name goes back to Wed, 4 Mar 1998 19:58:33 +0000 (GMT) and the corresponding post on the debian-devel-mailing list - https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/03/msg00332.html ]

[For the curious, there was apparently a point at which Red Hat considered adopting something other than RPM right back at the beginning. Of the surviving distributions: Slackware is first, a few months later is Debian, a couple of months later is Red Hat and SUSE is an independent entity out of Jurix. And, for the purists: Debian packaging and Red Hat packaging are largely equivalent when all's said and done. A Debian package can be stripped apart using cpio and tar - an rpm requires a specific binary to do this if I remember rightly.]

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 16:23 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

> Many Red Hat users have got used to using dnf/yum - in the case of yum, that's a third party contribution to Red Hat.

That's an odd way to phrase it given that it wasn't a contribution to the company as such, just happens to be an open source project not originating from any particular vendor like the vast majority of the distribution and I am not sure why it is relevant.

In any case, for the record, Seth Vidal who was the primary developer of Yum (and a key contributor to CentOS for that matter) and was an active direct contributor to Fedora during the time that Yum became default in Fedora (and subsequently RHEL, derived from Fedora adopted it) and was an employee of Red Hat for several years while working on Yum among other things till he passed away.

Some more backstory: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2013/07/in-memoriam-...

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 17:14 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

Only really that I knew that Yum concept basically came from outside Red Hat - Yellow Dog Linux, then - and is alien to fundamental RPM - it's an add on.. I was trying to demonstrate the difference between fancy front ends and the most fundamental package ordering/dependency resolving "thing" - dpkg for Debian and RPM for Red Hat and derived distributions. (And yes, RPM has had a couple more rewrites and a change to lower case: dpkg was rewritten a few times in 1994 but is essentially the same since then).

There's not a lot to choose between them, as I wrote: I've had someone complain at me that it was harder to check signatures of packages in Debian because Debian signs the package manifest - but, meh, apt[-get|itude] checks that for you automatically and will whinge at you if the package list is out of date.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 18:29 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Only really that I knew that Yum concept basically came from outside Red Hat - Yellow Dog Linux, then - and is alien to fundamental RPM - it's an add on

To be more accurate, YUP is from Yellow Dog. Yum although it shares some history with YUP is significantly different and originated from Duke university with Seth Vidal as the primary developer. Technically, similar to dpkg vs Apt. As you noted, just a higher level tool - I consider this as a package manager vs higher level dependency resolver (in Dnf - there are multiple libraries that handle different aspects and the resolver logic is part of libsolv - Originating from Opensuse). In Debian, there have been different resolvers in the past (Smart for example - Canonical at one point was considering making it the default resolver for Ubuntu).

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 22:53 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> a couple of months later is Red Hat and SUSE is an independent entity out of Jurix.

If I remember my SuSE history correctly, it started a few months before Red Hat as a Slackware derivative. Then they rebased it on Jurix, before starting to use rpm as their packaging solution.

Cheers,
Wol

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 29, 2020 16:06 UTC (Tue) by jwilk (subscriber, #63328) [Link] (1 responses)

> A Debian package can be stripped apart using cpio and tar

It's ar, not cpio: https://manpages.debian.org/deb.5

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 30, 2020 18:23 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

RPM packages are basically cpio archives with a header attached in front. There's an rpm2cpio program that will remove the header so the rest can be fed to cpio.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 19:54 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Just yesterday I needed to know what had installed the file /etc/OpenCL/vendors/mesa.icd
You can use "apt-file search /etc/OpenCL/vendors/mesa.icd". It optionally can search for it in the remote repositories.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 2:12 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

The ones you are likely to need (and their man pages) are all part of package "apt", which is Essential: yes (i.e. all users and packagers are allowed to assume it is present on a "normal" Debian system", so

apropos 'apt(-.*|)\>'

should do the trick.

Don't bother with the APT User Guide in package "apt-doc", though. As far as I can tell, it's desperately undermaintained.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 18, 2020 1:13 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, as someone who avoids apt-based distros like the plague, I doubt I'll be joining your community. That's fine, if you're happy there then all well and good.

Remember, what floats my boat may well sink yours, and vice versa.

My main package management tool is emerge, and there's a good community for me there, too ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol