I was wondering why fedora has choosen yum over apt-get

[Shahms King]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 09:56, Kristof Vansant wrote:
> What are the key benefits of yum over apt-get cause I got a friend telling
> me yum is crap and I should switch to apt-get in stead.
> Apt-get goes really fast in comparisment to yum.
> But I tell him there must be a good reason why fedora uses yum, I only don't
> know what :).
> 
> Can someone explain it to me.
> 
> Thx,
> 
> Lupus (Kristof Vansant Belgium)

I cannot speak for Fedora, but I can say that from my experiences using
both apt-rpm and yum I have found yum to be much more "reasonable".  I
suspect that the reason for this is that yum is more forgiving of minor
inconsistencies than is apt, which may be good or bad, depending on your
position.  Yum, unlike apt, will proceed with an upgrade or install even
if a completely unrelated package is slightly out-of-whack.

For example, I ran into problems relating to the gnome-libs package a
while back.  Apt was completely unable to resolve the issues (mostly
because of weird dependency issues).  An update would fail saying to run
'apt-get install -f' which would then offer to uninstall all of GNOME
for me, which was entirely unnecessary.  The "correct" (but ugly)
solution required removing the offending packages with --no-deps and
running yum to replace them (because apt refuses to run if the rpm
database is not in a consistent state).  You can argue that apt's
behavior is correct, but that correctness makes it completely useless in
many real-world situations.


Many packaging problems require "creative" (albeit temporary) solutions
until the upstream packages are fixed.  My tools should not get in my
way.  This is UNIX, my tools are supposed to do what I say, even if they
think I'm off my rocker.  There's a reason RPM lets you do stupid things
like "--force" and "--nodeps".  I have many more examples of apt getting
in my way where yum (by not trying to be as smart) worked.  Yum never
asks me to remove packages when I say "install" or "update".

-- 
Shahms King <shahms at shahms.com>