apt vs urpmi

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 2 May 2006, Vincent Danen wrote:

> 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've never even tried urpmi so can't compare, but I'll comment on what I 
can...

> 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).

Yes, smart is written in python with an exception of a smallish library 
written in C for performance reasons. Apt is C++ (and C for the embedded 
Lua interpreter) all the way.

> 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.

Yup, apt-rpm development was pretty much dead for the last two years with 
the main developer Gustavo Niemeyer working on Smart almost exclusively 
and dropped apt-rpm activities completely last year. I can't make any 
guarantees about future development of apt-rpm but as there IS interest in 
it still it's likely that the development/maintenance will continue, at 
least there's no shortage of ideas at the moment: :)
http://apt-rpm.laiskiainen.org/roadmap.shtml

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

Well, apt is pretty powerful but rather complex beast and certainly has 
it's quirks. It's also kinda niche market these days, the big rpm-based 
distros are preferring other alternatives. Whether it suits your purposes 
- hard to say. If you have some more detailed concerns of whether 
something is doable with apt / how things work etc I'll be happy to 
answer.

 	- Panu -