[ale] Fedora 15

Wed May 25 22:58:19 EDT 2011

One major improvement is the quantity and quality of the rpm repo mirrors.
Early yum days you were tied to the specific repo you first connected to.
Many were run as volunteer projects on donated equipment using minimal data
rate feed lines.

These days, the Fedora  repo mirrors are way faster and more stable and
often run by professionals or semi-pros with a vested interest in the repo
being live and current.

There are some serious differences in the package metadata between rpm and
deb. The major difference in in philosophy. RPM was designed from the
beginning to be usable at the large-scale deployment level, i.e. enterprise
scale. Debian's deb was designed to make single user system admin happy.
Different itch, different scratch.

With the rpm process from RedHat (and Fedora; not sure about SuSE and
Mandriva), I can get a "master copy" of the rpm data for a given release
that includes the md5sum of every package and config file as shipped from
the source distro. With this data (which can be secured offline), I can
verify if any binary has been changed or what config files are modified from
the original shipped version. Additionally, I have access to the as designed
file perms, original owner and group and the selinux data. I can track back
every binary and every config file to the package that installed it and
verify the binary is unchanged from the installation version that was crypto
signed with a gpg key I can verify.

Yum lets me handle the process of all dependencies nearly automagically.
Yes, it sometimes horks on a missing dependency and that is almost always
due to a mirror sync issue. Wait a few minutes (an hour is usually fine) and
try again. Sometimes a package is built using the wrong libs (very rare now
that koji is a happening thing!) and the flag --skip-broken will solve yum
update issues.

Lastly, there is now a solid communication  process between the major third
party repo rpm-fusion and fedora. On the day of F15 release, rpm-fusion had
all the "usual suspects" for the non-redistributable rpm's ready to roll at
the same time. So updates from F14 to F15 "JustWorked TM".

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Damon L. Chesser <damon at damtek.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 19:12 -0400, The Don Lachlan wrote:
> > On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 03:13:07PM -0400, Rich Faulkner wrote:
> > > Interesting.  Yum seems to move fast enough to me and gets me out of
> > > trouble when gpk-application takes a dump.  That has happened more than
> > > once in F12 and yum has always come through.  Might be interesting to
> > > test two VM's side-by-side and see who wins?  Apt, dpkg or yum?
> > >
> >
> > Anecdotally...
> >
> > I've not used yum in a few years and it had definitely improved its speed
> > from the walk-away-do-something-else pace it used to be but, compared to
> APT, it
> > was still slooooowwwwwwwwww.
> >
> > RPM is a poor substitute for Deb and every attempt to improve upon it is
> > still dealing with inherent failures of the packaging system. I say this
> as
> > someone who has WRITTEN dozens, maybe approaching a hundred, of spec
> files
> > and managed them. It's easier to write than a Deb but harder on the user.
>
> Not arguing, asking:  I thought technically they were the same, but the
> difference was in the front end:  Are you saying otherwise? (Old Debhead
> here)
>
>
> >
> > -L
> >
> > > On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 15:03 -0400, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > > > On 05/25/2011 11:47 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > > > > I find it odd that you had such major problems so quickly,
> considering
> > > > > F15 was just released yesterday.  If you were using a F15
> pre-release,
> > > > > well, that could certainly be the explanation of your issues.
> > > > >
> > > > > As for the package manager being slow, I think it's just a
> perception
> > > > > thing.  It also depends on your network connection.  I've found apt
> to
> > > > > be slow at times, too.  It all depends what needs to be done, and
> how
> > > > > recently you've run it.
> > > > >
> > > > > I plan to install F15 today once my new hard drive arrives.
> > > > >
> > > > I installed it a couple of weeks ago, but I wound up removing it
> > > > yesterday because I was still having some troubles with it.  I'll
> > > > admit to part of my troubles being a lack of familiarity with the
> > > > packaging system—I feel "at home" with dpkg and APT.  I can use rpm
> > > > alright, but this yum thing is just slow.  It seems to take forever
> > > > for the "resolving dependencies" step, and I had a problem where it
> > > > couldn't resolve dependencies.  I've had problems with RPM-based
> > > > distributions failing to resolve dependencies as far back as the
> first
> > > > Red Hat (version 5.2 from the 90s) that I had ever installed.  My
> > > > understanding then was that it was a repository issue of some sort.
> > > > But the thing is that I've never had such a problem with APT: it has
> > > > always resolved dependencies correctly, but if a dependency is
> > > > unavailable, it will say "I cannot install package foo because the
> > > > package isn't in the repository" and trying 30 minutes later usually
> > > > yields success.
> > > >
> > > >     --- Mike
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Ale mailing list
> > > > Ale at ale.org
> > > > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > > > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > > > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> --
> Damon
> damon at damtek.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky*
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