Dependency hell

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Russell Coker wrote:

> On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 20:00, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Apr 12, 2004, Russell Coker <russell at coker.com.au> wrote:
> > >> > However I expect apt to be phased out, so it's probably not worth
> > >> > doing.
> > >>
> > >> I don't see it going away anytime soon.
> > >
> > > So we will have both apt and yum doing much the same thing?
> >
> > We (Fedora Core) don't ship apt (ATM?), but there's no reason to make
> > the life of those who prefer apt over yum or up2date more difficult.
> > Especially after all of them switch to a common repository format.
> > And even more so considering that we don't have a GUI front-end for
> > Extras similar to synaptics (that I've never used myself, FWIW)
> >
> > It's about choice.  It's not like we should decide whether our users
> > should use Gnome or KDE; GNU Emacs or XEmacs or vim or whatever.
> 
> True, we want to give choice.  But when deciding how much work we want to 
> spend on supporting one particular choice we have to think about how much use 
> it's going to get.  I was under the impression that yum was the preferred 
> choice as apt was designed to work best for Debian packages with separate 
> install and configure stages etc.

Apt was designed to be package format independent from the start, it just 
took a while before rpm-support was added. And yes, certain amount of 
debianisms exist in there but separate install/configure stages have 
preciously little to do with anything, apt-rpm simply doesn't have a 
"configure" stage.

For basic updating and installing packages it's pretty much irrelevant
whether you use apt, up2date, yum, red-carpet or whatever, they all
get the job done. Apt has some nice things for developers, like installing
build dependencies of a given package, retrieve and install + optionally
build src.rpm's. It also has an embedded scripting language which allows 
all sorts of cool things like adding new commands and customizing apt 
behavior without having to touch apt's code at all - for example of this 
check out the mirror-selector system in fedora.us apt. In short - it does 
some things that the other depsolvers don't (currently) and lots of people 
happen to like those features :)

	- Panu -