apt vs urpmi

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at laiskiainen.org
Wed May 3 09:20:03 PDT 2006


On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 09:46 -0600, Vincent Danen wrote:
> * Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at laiskiainen.org> [2006-05-03 02:25:09 -0700]:
> > 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.  =)

Heh, well the website was only created last month :D

> > > 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?

Yup, no problemo, they're just like any old dependencies on so-names or
depedencies on manual provides from apt's POV. Also arbitrary file
dependencies which at least RH/FC camp is using heavily are fully
supported.

	- Panu -




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