[CentOS-devel] Why not a fusion between CentOS and SL?

[Lamar Owen]

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.