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 :)