Re: what about APT-RPM?

[seth vidal <skvidal phy duke edu>]

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 16:08, Matthias Saou wrote:
> Bart Whiteley wrote :
> 
> > Could you please elaborate on "much cleaner way"?
> 
> I could let Seth answer that one :-)
> Very quickly summarised, the main problem I see with apt is that it
> reimplements quite a lot of dependency algorithms, so it "calculates"
> pretty much everything on its own before actually calling the rpm binary in
> order to proceed with the changes. OTOH, yum uses calls to rpmlib directly
> through the python bindings, so it lets rpm do pretty much everything on
> its own... a good thing.

As you said it looks like panu is fixing this. some potholes that way
but it should mean apt will play more nicely.

there are two major advantages I see in yum over apt - these are just my
opinions and I'm obviously biased so please take them as you will:

1. yum is in python apt is in c++, python is much simpler to get started
in for a new programmer. It also is a lot easier to get things working
quickly and get going somewhere

2. yum isn't carrying much baggage with it so far. B/c yum is much
younger than the total lifespan of apt-get (as a debian program and as
an rpm updater) it doesn't have a lot of legacy and baggage that apt
carries along. Yum has 7000 lines of code vs 40000 lines of code. A
signficant difference if you want to add a feature or just get started
understanding what's going on.

With all that said there are still a number of features that apt has
that are kinda spiffy that yum does not have.

And to be fair to yum there are a number of features it has that are not
in apt.

so. - that's my summary, complete w/personal bias.

oh yahh - info on yum: http://linux.duke.edu/yum/

-sv