[Tfug] From APT to RPM?

[Jim March]

On 2/2/07, Tim Ottinger <tottinge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You moved FROM apt systems TO rpm systems?  I couldn't imagine going in
> that
>
> direction.  So I have some questions maybe you can help me with:
>
> 1) Are you nuts?  ;-)
>
> 2) Why did you do it?
>
> 3) Are you using one of the cool new package managers?
>
> 4) How is that working for you?



It seems to depend on which RPM system we're talking about.

Ubuntu's Edgy was as fundamentally unstable as Hillary :).  Seriously, it
was a monster.  There was a recent article on Slashdot about how Edgy drove
some dude back to XP :(.

Jumping to OpenSuse (sorta RPM) did indeed suck wind as far as package
management.  It was stable, but YaST is brain-dead.

Red Hat/Fedora's "yum" at the command line and "pirut" at the GUI are pretty
decent.  Not as slick as apt-get and Synaptic but at least 80% as good.  And
there's a bonus: so far RPM files from OpenOffice (v.2.1) and others not
written for the Red Hat family in particular have loaded no sweat.

In other words, in my experience the combination of yum/pirut and this
native RPM swallowing ability AND being a recent-model cutting edge distro
that doesn't break easily is working out OK.

The problem with FC6 is that it's so bleeding edge, every once in a while an
auto-update will make something go wonky.  Breaking flash/USB automount was
the latest, but a few minutes on fedoraforums showed where the cure was.

If either Debian Etch or Feisty turn out OK I'll be more than interested in
jumping back.

Jim