Vince Hoang wrote:
Apt is just less annoying to me. FC2's yum has --download-only
now, so my #1 issue is gone. Now if yum would stop downloading
individual headers for _every_ package...
In a sense this behavior is better. apt does seem to keep its header
database relatively small, but it stil has to download the whole
database every time. urpmi does not do this as well and as a result,
hdlist.cz is 20MB. yum headers are each tiny, and yum only needs to
download ones that were changed or haven't already been downloaded. So
I think in theory yum has the best approach. In practice, setting up a
separate http/ftp connection for each file may add some time, plus other
overhead dealing with multiple files. But yum could download multiple
headers in parallel. The main concern is the total size of all headers
for each. I think urpmi loses by far, but apt and yum are pretty
similar, and yum has the advantage of not needing to download the whole
database if one package changes.
Having said all that, I have only used yum twice and almost exclusively
use apt. Make sure that with apt-get you only use 'upgrade', and not
'dist-upgrade' unless you know what you are doing and are prepared to
fix some problems. That's the main problem people have with apt is that
everyone tells them to dist-upgrade, then it deletes kde or something.
I haven't read the docs for it, but the format of the yum sources
configuration file is ugly and strange. apt just uses a URL, which is
pretty straightforward to change. The mirror-select function in apt is
great and does all that work for you, though. RedHat does not seem to
be committed to using and supporting apt, though. At least not yet.
-Eric Hattemer
