Robert - elists wrote:

I was checking out Dag's ( not dagw ;-> ) new blog...

I don't know how much, if at all, this has been debated...

http://dag.wieers.com/blog/using-apt-in-an-rpm-world

if he is so adamant about apt over yum, why are we using yum still?

Laziness? ;-) ...or are we just tasty food centric?

I think because yum works "good enough" and it's been around in the RPM-based world for a long time now, and has been adopted by other RPM-based distributions.

I've been using apt since it first came out(in Debian 2.1 I think) around 8 years ago, and it works great, I really like it a lot. Though yum seems to work fine too. I don't use any of the advanced abilities of yum or apt.

A plus for yum, is I was astonished how easy it was to setup a yum repo, I just pointed it at the copied contents of the CDs and it worked. apt by contrast with it's pools and stuff it was difficult for me to get a working repository(I had done it in the past but the tool I used which is still promoted to some extent didn't work as expected with the new archives resulting in my system downloading 10x+ more data then it needed to). Even the new debmirror has it's quirks, especially for security updates, took a while to get used to it. Maybe apt repositories for RPMs are just as easy to setup as YUM repositories, not sure, but for debian packages at least it's a pain.

For me the various package tools/managers all work well it's more about the package repositories. The testing and integration work involved with tieing thousands of packages together so they work right is really a tough thing to do, my biggest complaint about RHEL(and derivatives ), is the lack of package selection in the main repo. I've never been fond of using 3rd party repositories, I've seen a lot of problems on this list over the past few weeks that seemed to stem from them to some extent. In my production systems I do use probably 35 3rd party RPMs but they are all built from source(SRPMS) and installed "manually"(using an automation tool called cfengine), not installed via yum.

apt certainly is faster, I don't like how yum updates the package descriptions, though it's not deal killer for me.

I use/prefer RHEL/CentOS on my work stuff, especially when tied into kickstart/cfengine etc. I use/prefer Debian(stable, not testing or unstable) on systems that are managed by hand(home, or very small environments). And Ubuntu on stuff like laptops that need more up to date drivers.

nate (Debian user since ~1998, RHEL user since ~2003, CentOS user since ~2006)

Robert - elists wrote:

I was checking out Dag's ( not dagw ;-> ) new blog...

I don't know how much, if at all, this has been debated...

http://dag.wieers.com/blog/using-apt-in-an-rpm-world

if he is so adamant about apt over yum, why are we using yum still?

Laziness? ;-) ...or are we just tasty food centric?

Yum yum yum !!!

• rh

The real answer is this ... upstream uses yum.

Dag does like apt better than yum, and there are some things apt does better than yum. However, I really don't think Red Hat will ever shift from yum to apt, certainly not in the foreseeable future.

Newer yum things are happening in fedora, and it looks like RHEL6 will also have yum, so we will continue supporting yum.

If you want to use apt (or red carpet, or yast, or <put_your_app_here> then if it works for you, great.

However, yum is the supported way to get updates.