Le mardi 28 septembre 2010 à 20:20 +0100, Richard a écrit : > I confess to a quite high level of ignorance about package managers, as I > have > only ever known and used rpmdrake in its evolution since around 2000, but you > have both said things to make me think that some of the frustrations I have > experienced since 2008 Spring may be due to controllable features of the > package manager. > > The simplest analysis tells us that rpmdrake does its job admirably; point, > click and presto, your software is installed (OK, you may have to click a > couple more times to agree to the selected packages list). > > How much better could it possibly do this? What am I missing? You have both > mentioned alternatives, some of which I know by name, but in what way do apt, > yum or smart do this job any better?
Well, apt is likely to be faster, c++ may be the cause. Smart is portable across type of repository. It also use a cleaner design or algorithm, according to his developer. Among nice features, it can draw graphs of the dependency, feature a command line shell or parallel downloads ( http://labix.org/smart/features ) Yum is likely the more different of the 3. Yum has auto update feature ( ie, it doesn't have a update command ) has a plugin infrastructure ( who permit to extend the core in nice way ), and is still developped. Now, the "install package", "remove package" are basic features that all of them do. And I think that all packages managers are equal on that regard. > I realise that package managers are needed because humans have to add some > intelligence in the form of what libraries are needed to get a program to > run. I also know that sometimes humans get this badly wrong (try removing a > library that you know will never be used and ask yourself why rpmdrake wants > to remove over 200 packages with it!). Do other package managers manage to > avoid this embarassing and frustrating behaviour? or is it that it is just > easier to get it right with package types other than rpm? Nope, the problem is not linked to rpm or deb. If a library is needed, it is needed, that's simple. A system like emerge or macports ( macports is also in contribs, afaik ) may however reduce the required dependency, depending on the software. -- Michael Scherer
