[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Johnny Hughes]

On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 21:38 +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 5 Sep 2005 at 1:06pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote
> > 
> > > All-in-all, use the tool that is supported by the distro.  That is YUM.
> > > No, there is no GUI for it that is supported officially, hence some of
> > > the complaints.  But I'm keeping my eye on SmartPM for the future.
> > 
> > I have yet to see any advantage to a GUI package manager.  But, then 
> > again, that's just me.
> 
> Smart is not a GUI per se. It is a command line tool and people are 
> working on a curses-based front-end. A KDE panel applet exists as well.
> 
> There are benefits to having an integrated command line tool and GUI from 
> a maintenance perspective. Most of the code can be reused.
> 
> I would love to have RHN support and finally get rid of up2date :)
> 
> The biggest disadvantage for both Yum and Smart is that both require a 
> recent version of python. Which is a no-go for older distributions.
> 

very true

> BTW The developer previously was in charge of apt-rpm and worked on 
> synaptic too. Smart is available for most of the popular distributions.
> 

Smart looks nice and is moving along OK, and having a GUI is good.
Smart can use repomd (Repo MetaData) used by yum and the metadata used
by apt.  It also has a couple features that I like ... one of them is
signing a priority to a repo (ie, you can make packages in the base repo
have a higher score than a add-on repo.  This would only update absolute
requirements from the add-on repo.)

yum is also making progress with a sqlite backend.  This speeds up yum.
A new createrepo (creates the repomd data for yum) also now caches the
md5sums for packages, so it runs faster too.

I personally use yum ... though I have one test machine that is using
smart.  Even when I use smart, I use the CLI and not the GUI.

CentOS-4.2 will have an upgrade to yum 2.4.x and createrepo-0.4.3, which
requires a couple packages to be added to the distribution.  The new
pacakges will be:

createrepo-0.4.3-1.noarch.rpm (upgrade from 0.4.2)
python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.i386.rpm
python-sqlite-1.1.6-1.i386.rpm
python-urlgrabber-2.9.6-2.noarch.rpm
sqlite-3.2.2-1.i386.rpm
sqlite-devel-3.2.2-1.i386.rpm
yum-2.4.0-1.centos4.noarch.rpm (upgrade from 2.2.1)

One very good thing for CentOS is that Seth Vidal is one of the CentOS
Developers, so we will have extended yum support for the duration :)
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