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

[Malcolm <mjhlists-plug-20080906@liminalflux.net>]

On 2011-11-09 4:09 AM, sean finney wrote:

> 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 :)

I haven't really used plan dpkg much, so I can't compare.

> > 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.

and it's still enough of a pain to ask "what package in the repository 
contains file X" that it's faster to use google.

> 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.

Oh, I totally agree on the RedHat side.

> 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!)

I haven't used SuSE to know how they've done it.

> 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'.

The urpmi format changes have been additions, not the underlying 
structure (adding incremental support so you don't have to download the 
entire metadata block for a large repository if they just updated a 
couple of packages; and adding a "light" format that just contains 
enough to do installs and dependencies - similar to what apt seems to 
use, with the "heavy" format downloaded if you ask it for something that 
needs it - like "what package that I don't have installed provides X").

urpmi is one of the reasons I've stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia so 
long.


> </rant>  :)

:-)
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