apt vs urpmi

[Vincent Danen]

Hi everyone.  Just joined the list today because, from a development
perspective, urpmi is irritating me a little bit.  So I'm here to ask a
fairly blunt question:

Has anyone compared urpmi to apt-rpm lately?  I mean within the last
6mos to a year.  The reason I ask is I'm working on a secure Linux
distro called Annvix and I've been using urpmi since I forked Mandrake
9.2, partly because I forked Mandrake and partly because I love urpmi
and have used it since day one.

I'm having some technical issues with the latest version of urpmi which
is having me revisit the whole packaging thing.  RPM is a definite must
for my distro because I think deb packages are awful.  So looking at the
options out there I see urpmi, yum, apt, and smart.  yum is out because
I'm not a big python fan and I don't want to require python if I don't
have to (you can easily get away with running Annvix completely without
python).  Perl is an unfortunate side-effect of using urpmi, which made
me think of apt and it not requiring anything (from my understanding,
smart also requires python).

I'm not overly familiar with apt, although I've used it with fink on OS
X.  And have limited experience with it on ubuntu.  So I'd like really
candid feedback on how apt compares to urpmi (note that I don't care
about GUIs... Annvix doesn't come with X, it's completely CLI-based so
all the frontends for urpmi or apt aren't part of the equation).

My other concern was back in October (I believe), there didn't seem to
be much interest in continued development for apt-rpm, although it
sounds to me now that it's picking up again.  Is development planned on
apt-rpm for the forseeable future?  I know that Mandriva merging with
Conectiva probably threw a wrench in things because Mandriva prefers
urpmi, but I know a number of other distros use apt-rpm.

Essentially, I'm wondering if it would be worth the time to look at
apt-rpm as an alternative/replacement for urpmi in Annvix.

Any opinions and ideas would be appreciated.  Thanks.

-- 
Annvix - Secure Linux Server: http://annvix.org/
"lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import"
{FEE30AD4 : 7F6C A60C 06C2 4811 FA1C  A2BC 2EBC 5E32 FEE3 0AD4}
Wasting time like it was free...
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