I have seen messages posted on the Fedora oriented forums that imply that "yum" is antiquated. Not being a Linux guru, I do not have the experience to make a thorough evaluation, but so far it has been just great. Todd -- Ariste Software 200 D Street Ext Petaluma, CA 94952 (707) 773-4523
On 09/05/2005 04:58 PM, Todd Cary wrote:> I have seen messages posted on the Fedora oriented forums that imply > that "yum" is antiquated. Not being a Linux guru, I do not have the > experience to make a thorough evaluation, but so far it has been just > great.First of all: You shall not believe everything that you read. :-) Yum, is one of the youngest players in the rpm update world. Yum has been (re-)written by Seth Vidal. Project page: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ Nothing more to say, if you read the project page. Yum is still under active development by Seth and friends; So antiquated is not correct! What is antiquated in some way is up2date. It's still used by RH and there are good reasons for 'em to use it... What is also antiquated in some way is apt. But my recommandation against apt comes from technical view: apt wasn't meant to play with rpm, even if it seems to work fine. However... yum is currently the best tool for Fedora, CentOS, AlphaLinux, etc. because it's easy to use, it's easy to build own repositories and there are MANY yum-repositories out there allready... And yum knows how to play well with rpm... Best, Oliver
On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 07:58 -0700, Todd Cary wrote:> I have seen messages posted on the Fedora oriented forums that imply > that "yum" is antiquated. Not being a Linux guru, I do not have the > experience to make a thorough evaluation, but so far it has been just > great.Some of the same people, among others, will also say APT is "not native" to RPM, and only works well for DPKG. In reality, it's really more about the repositories than the tools. Although SmartPM looks to finally remove a lot of the issues. I think the biggest gripe about YUM is the lack of a standard GUI, and YumEx has had compatibility issues in the past with newer YUM versions. SmartPM focuses on solving cross-repository issues and comes with a GUI as standard. All-in-all, use the tool that is supported by the distro. That is YUM. No, there is no GUI for it that is supported officially, hence some of the complaints. But I'm keeping my eye on SmartPM for the future. -- Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The best things in life are NOT free - which is why life is easiest if you save all the bills until you can share them with the perfect woman
I look after 3 versions of CentOS, 2, 3 & 4. Each has it's own different version of yum. Different versions have different command line parameters, different header formats, different config file layouts etc. Yum headers are also not very robust. You can't safely use yum while a) updating your mirror or b) running yum-arch (with -c which takes along time, esp on openoffice). This is a PITA when you are patching a lot of machines and want to obtain new software at the same time. I also think that yum needs a way to track certain packages only from a specific repository, rather than the entire repo (ie. I want 1 package from Dag, not everything). (I don't know if new versions can do this...) I also think yum is too slow. All those issues aside, every other solution seems to have similar problems. On CentOS-2 I normally use arrghpm which is a tool I wrote to do what I want. It does not rely on headers at all but it is not designed to solve dependencies (because rpm already does that). (OT Side note. Mirroring updates for CentOS 3 & 4 is also a PITA because I need to have multiple directories, one for each point release. It is just me???) Todd Cary wrote:> I have seen messages posted on the Fedora oriented forums that imply > that "yum" is antiquated. Not being a Linux guru, I do not have the > experience to make a thorough evaluation, but so far it has been just > great. > > Todd >-- John Newbigin Computer Systems Officer Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/staff/jnewbigin
Todd Cary wrote:> I have seen messages posted on the Fedora oriented forums that imply > that "yum" is antiquated. Not being a Linux guru, I do not have the > experience to make a thorough evaluation, but so far it has been just > great.Unlike Linux gurus, for whom the rest of the user world is like themselves, there are a great many users who like ease of use and graphical applications and yum is strictly command line. I know yumex exists but it does not come automatically installed when one installs CentOS ( nor does Synaptic for that matter ). So perhaps yum would be more popular if yumex, or whatever is the popular GUI front end for yum now, were also installed, and added to the menu system, when CentOS is installed. I have used both yumex and synaptic, and both have strengths and weaknesses. But quite frankly I find Synaptic easier and clearer to use. I realize that for experienced Linux users that argument holds no weight but for the casual Linux desktop user it is very important.