apt vs urpmi

Vincent Danen vdanen at annvix.org
Wed May 3 08:46:12 PDT 2006


* Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at laiskiainen.org> [2006-05-03 02:25:09 -0700]:

> > 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...

Fair enough, and appreciated.

> > 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.

That's what I thought.. I'm not too keen on making python a base
requirement for just one program.  As it stands now, I can get away
without having python installed at all, and I'd like to keep it that
way.  In fact, I wouldn't mind so much getting rid of perl as a
dependency as well, although there are so many programs that use it the
chances of it being removed completely are small (but for small-ish
systems that don't use a lot of "extras", if urpmi were gone, then perl
would be gone too).

> > 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

I was reading the roadmap which is what made me think it was back in
more-or-less active development.  The fact that the website had a lot of
last-modified dates of last month helped as well.  =)

> > 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.

Well, I don't have anything specific yet because I'm moderately familiar
with apt, and even then only on OS X with fink.  But the answers you've
provided are enough that I can start to experiment with it and, for a
time, maybe have it in parallel with urpmi (at least on the development
branch) and we'll see where it leads.

One question I do have is in regards to these new dependencies that are
out there, such as perl(Net::SNMP) for instance, vs. a dependency on a
package name.  If an rpm depends on perl(Net::SNMP) rather than
perl-Net-SNMP, will apt properly install perl-Net-SNMP (which also
provides perl(Net::SNMP))?  I believe with newer rpm there are other
similar non-package-name type dependencies.  Does apt handle those?


Thanks!

-- 
Annvix - Secure Linux Server: http://annvix.org/
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Wasting time like it was free...
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