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Package Management: APT for RPM

2004-09-13 12:55

I have been a big fan of ap­t4rpm ev­er since I worked at Conec­ti­va (the guys who cre­at­ed the thing).

Man­ag­ing Red Hat and Fe­do­ra servers with­out it would be a PI­TA.

Sad­ly, I see lots of peo­ple who don't know about it, or know, but don't use it to its fullest. So, here's a few tip­s...

Richard Bos / 2006-04-03 11:15:

For SUSE there is apt4rpm too, all information

can be found at:

http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm



If you can not find your rpm here you will

have a hard time finding it somewhere else,

it's quite a big repository ;)

T Patterson / 2006-04-03 11:16:

Been using APT for SuSE for a while now.

Amazing tool. I recommend to everyone who can, use it. You'll love it!

T Mathiesen / 2006-04-03 11:17:

Been using APT for Fedora core 1 and 2 + RedHat 9.. and it works great. Yum is another tool, but I've found APT to be more reliable (Yum crashes every now and again).

Sergio / 2006-04-03 11:17:

I did't like the heavy linking, sorry :)



Seriously, the heavy linking is actually harmful. It introduces a lot of noise, and after a while people just stop folowing the links as most of them are useless. So at the end, they might miss the good links.

sergio / 2006-04-03 11:18:

On a second thought, there are not actually that many useless links in your article.

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 11:19:

The idea of mixing useless and useful links is to keep people on their toes. Writing this kind of thing is hard, reading it should not be that easy! ( that was just a joke ;-)


VonSkippy / 2006-04-03 11:20:

I thought it was a great article. The part about editing and maintaining custom repositories (especially compared to YUM) was very informative. Good Job!

AdamW / 2006-04-03 11:21:

you could add Mandrake users to the list of people who have no need to read this article, as urpmi does all the same jobs as apt...

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 11:22:

Well, yes, except I have always found urpmi to be:



* Very very slow (at least to do the equivalent of apt-get update)



* Much harder to configure



But yeah, it doesn the same thing, and it works.



At least that was my experience circa Mandrake 9, which was the last time I used it.

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 11:23:

Easyurpmi is good for what it does, but suppose you find a urpmi repository outside Mandrake. How does easyurpmi help you?



Notice the final step in easyurpmi is like this:



urpmi.addmedia plf ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distr... with synthesis.hdlist.cz

urpmi.addmedia jpackage ftp://mirror.pacific.net.au... with ../../../i586/Mandrake/base/synthesis.hdlist3.cz

urpmi.addmedia club ftp://mirror.pacific.net.au... with synthesis.hdlist.cz



That's the kind of thing you have to do to configure urpmi :-)

jmfayard / 2006-04-03 11:23:

Grief #2 about urpmi being much harder to configure is wrong.



A user just have to visit "Easyurpmi" http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/, select hist distro, choose his source, , click on a button, and copy-paste the command-line provided.



It's really a great tool. Maybe someone can make the same for APT for Redhat or SuSE

jmfayrd / 2006-04-03 11:25:

With easyurpmi, you have :



main (the power pack, that is 9 CDs of RPMs)

contrib (all third party rpms (from the guys in cooker) goes here. with main, that makes >9000 RPMs)

plf (all the illegal software, CSS cracker, video players, P2P software, ...)



The thing is that all contributors outside mandrakesoft tends to take part on cooker and contribute in contrib, or in plf if this raise legal problems. Because of this, you don't really need to search other repositories.

Ori Golan / 2006-04-03 14:46:

This article is a fine work.

Thanx for the effort. Overloading links is a fun, although pricy for the writer. Consider it a personal touch, acceptable when talent is demonstrated.