On Thursday, March 24, 2011 11:42:30 am Dag Wieers wrote:
On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Lamar Owen wrote:
Or we could all still be on apt-rpm and still be having multilib and related issues. And while synaptic is still far and away the best package management GUI out there bar none, the apt-rpm backend has (or at least had) significant issues at that time.
Hey !
HiHi! :-) I figured you'd reply, Dag.... in a good way, of course.
There was nothing wrong with apt-rpm, I've been using it until November last year on CentOS-5 before I switched to RHEL6. The multi-lib problems were exagerated and fixed,
As the fix occurred after I switched off of the apt-rpm setup (I had apt-rpm primarily to get the excellent DAG repo running on one box and Axel's repo running on another) to a fully yum setup (with no really useful GUI; that was the bummer), at least until F8, after which I did the Grand two-year Kubuntu Experiment (from 7.04 up through 9.04; I never had that much trouble with Fedora's KDE!) and then back to F11.... And while I am less than thrilled with any of the PackageKit GUI's, it is what it is. One can always dream that a real 'synaptic for RPM' could happen.....
the biggest problem was the lack of development after the main developer moved to Conectiva, and the second maintainer to Red Hat.
Those are the issues to which I referred....
But I do prefer python over C++ anytime, though speedwise it was unbeatable.
At the time I last used it, synaptic could have all the updated headers downloaded, I could have my new selections made, and the update could be halfway done before the yumex of that time had finished updating the yum cache. Yumex is still not a speed demon, that's for sure. This is one place the Ubuntu and Debian updaters excel: they are wicked fast. But no presto; and on slower lines and for bigger updates presto is a major win.
But the apt-rpm code is not the easiest code in the world, and you're very right: my preference to the maintainability of python over C++ means that I'll just have a less useful GUI for real package managment. At least until either I get motivated enough to do it, or someone else gets motivated enough to give packagekit that powerful synaptic goodness.