Gus Wirth wrote:
> I was perusing the Fedora Extras repositories for something and came
> across a collection of great add-ons for yum.
>
> With all these add-ons for yum I'm not sure what else is left that
> apt-get and dpgk do that yum and rpm don't.
apt-get was a middle level tool, and dpkg was always a back-end tool.
The front ends are aptitude, synaptic, and the venerable dselect. That
said, let's get to comparing!
With aptitude, you can mark a manually installed package as
automatically installed. This comes into play when removing non-required
dependencies.
Say you install foo and libfoo by hand (dpkg -i). You can tell aptitude
that libfoo was installed automatically, as if you had done an aptitude
install foo, which then pulled libfoo in. When you decided that you no
longer needed foo (aptitude remove foo) it will remove libfoo, too.
Otherwise you would be stuck with libfoo (aptitude thinking that since
you installed it manually, you really wanted it even if nothing else
installed required it).
dpkg, upon removal, can leave its configuration files behind (remove vs
purge) so if you install it again later, you don;t have to re-do all of
your custom configurations. I have no idea if yum can do this or not.
aptitude can *forbid* a *specifc* version. If you are using foo-1.3, and
you know that foo-1.4 will be bad, but expect foo-1.5 to be good, you
can tell aptitude to forbid version 1.4 of foo, and it will. When 1.5
become available, it will go ahead and make the upgrade.
aptitude can let you search the database without any sort of network
connection. Even if the last time you used aptitude was months ago. You
can also install a new package without needing to get the lastest and
greatest package list, even if the last time you ran aptitude was years
ago. I have not found a way to do that with yum.[1]
[1] I found a way. Thank you, google.
$ yum -C
You can play minesweeper in aptitude.
apt-get has an easter egg. aptitude does not. I am unaware of any yum/
up2date easter eggs.
My fedora box is at home, and off at the moment so I can't really go
playing with yum right now to test all of these good things that
aptitude can do.
There are also so many more things.
You did say *apt-get* and *dpkg*. I am aware of that. I am also under
the impresson that yum is the proscribed front-end to rpm. With Debian,
the proscrbed front-end is aptitude. This is why I beleive that the
comparison is not unfair, just baised.
Please let me know of any errors I made about Fedora and yum.
-john
$ sudo apt-get build-dep foo
$ fakeroot apt-get --build source foo
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