[LUAU] apt RPM

[Eric Hattemer]

Vince Hoang wrote:

>Apt is just less annoying to me. FC2's yum has --download-only
>now, so my #1 issue is gone. Now if yum would stop downloading
>individual headers for _every_ package...
>  
>
In a sense this behavior is better.  apt does seem to keep its header 
database relatively small, but it stil has to download the whole 
database every time.  urpmi does not do this as well and as a result, 
hdlist.cz is 20MB.  yum headers are each tiny, and yum only needs to 
download ones that were changed or haven't already been downloaded.  So 
I think in theory yum has the best approach.  In practice, setting up a 
separate http/ftp connection for each file may add some time, plus other 
overhead dealing with multiple files.  But yum could download multiple 
headers in parallel.  The main concern is the total size of all headers 
for each.  I think urpmi loses by far, but apt and yum are pretty 
similar, and yum has the advantage of not needing to download the whole 
database if one package changes. 

Having said all that, I have only used yum twice and almost exclusively 
use apt.  Make sure that with apt-get you only use 'upgrade', and not 
'dist-upgrade' unless you know what you are doing and are prepared to 
fix some problems.  That's the main problem people have with apt is that 
everyone tells them to dist-upgrade, then it deletes kde or something.  
I haven't read the docs for it, but the format of the yum sources 
configuration file is ugly and strange.  apt just uses a URL, which is 
pretty straightforward to change.  The mirror-select function in apt is 
great and does all that work for you, though.  RedHat does not seem to 
be committed to using and supporting apt, though.  At least not yet. 

-Eric Hattemer