[ILUG] Re: yum and apt gurus, please read

[Paul Jakma]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Joseph Kiniry wrote:

> Wrt your earlier stability complaint Paul, you might not that an 
> apology was issued by the Fedora crew this weekend over the borked 
> i386 Perl released on AMD64.

See, that's the problem with yum... it doesn't allow RPM to do its 
job and catch problems. It's super-confident that it knows the 
upgrade will work, so it tells rpmlib to force install.

Apt doesn't do that. It does its own dependency checks and if it 
thinks its safe, it proceeds, but it doesn't tell RPM to force 
install, so if apt got it wrong RPM can still catch the problem.

Now, apt doesnt support multi-lib (needed for x86_64) - it just 
doesn't grok the concept of 'same package, but different arches' at 
all. Yum 'claims' to, but that's really a lie, it just force installs 
and prays the packages were properly done..

I prefer the apt way to be honest (cause its honest). I'd never 
*ever* run yum from cron a multi-arch machine - it will almost 
certainly mess an x86_64 machine up in time.

> I have yet to have a problem with yum and I just have it 
> automatically update my system every night unless a very high 
> priority security update is made available that I feel needs to be 
> installed in minutes instead of hours.

Not an x86_64 machine so.

> system patched, and is low maintenance.  Often times that is what is shipped 
> with the OS, not what is grafted on by 18 year old hackers after-the-fact.

All the various debian developers and the people at Conectiva who did 
the RPM port would be interested to hear themselves described as 
such.

Enjoy yum, dont forget to keep your fingers crossed (and for quite a 
while, given its awesome speed ;) ).

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
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