[CentOS] apt vrs yum ?

Tue Jul 8 17:17:46 UTC 2008
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

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)