[Mageia-discuss] Package management system

Tue Sep 28 23:21:08 CEST 2010

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
+
+