Re: [PLUG] diagnosing slow Fedora boots w/bootchart, cont'd

[sean finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 03:01:27PM -0500, Malcolm wrote:
> That's because they aren't the same thing. rpm is more like dpkg.

yeah, but dpkg is also far better than rpm :)

> If you want to compare apt against an rpm based system, it would be
> yum (on RedHat derivatives) or urpmi (on Mandriva derivatives).
> 
> IMnshO, apt beats yum readily, but I definitely prefer urpmi.

(disclaimer) I admit to not having a lot of experience with mandriva,
especially nothing >= 2005.

The reason why apt outshines basically any package management system I've
had to butt heads with is that it's based on solid design principles (a
lot of that indirectly through Debian policy).  So they got it really
close to the mark on the first try, and since then have only had to
incrementally improve on it.

If you look at a lot of the rpm-derived systems, this clearly wasn't a
priority in the lower layer (rpm), and on top of that they didn't
introduce this higher layer (up2date/yum/etc) of packagement management
until much later, did *not* get it right on the first try, had to pile
lots of extra crap into it because the lower layer was also lacking
a lot of featuers/functionality, and *still* weren't able to produce a
system with a comparable level of functionality.  

Eventually the higher layer became unteneable to use/maintain, and
someone would write up a clean-slate new implementation.  Just look at
SuSE, which seems to have a new package manager every single release
(seriously!)  It's less ridiculous on RH-derived systems in that respect,
but if you look at the change history for yum, how many times they've needed
to entirely change the package metadata format, etc, it still feels like the
ground that it's built on is not as solid as deb-derived distros'.

</rant> :)


	sean
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