Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 09, 2004 10:23 PM
It's not exactly that... what most RPM distros lack is a very strict policy for package management - which is why Debian's mechanism just works compared to the opposition.
That being said, urpmi is quite a cool tool (using it for the Mandrakelinux-based workstations I admin), but the policies that Mandrakelinux employs on its packages has yet to reach to the level that Debian has, particularly when you try to do distribution upgrades. Example: urpmi would happily upgrade the default python install as mandrake's policy calls for this. on the other hand, python in debian is a metapackage that depends on a default version of python (say 2.3). Upgrading the system would result in two versions of python installed side-by-side, minimizing breakage (if not prevented at all) that may have occured say if you have compiled your own python modules.
This and other policies are enforced in debian to the package level - and this is the strength that apt-get capitalizes (among other things).
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Re:apt-get vs. urpmi
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 09, 2004 10:23 PMThat being said, urpmi is quite a cool tool (using it for the Mandrakelinux-based workstations I admin), but the policies that Mandrakelinux employs on its packages has yet to reach to the level that Debian has, particularly when you try to do distribution upgrades. Example: urpmi would happily upgrade the default python install as mandrake's policy calls for this. on the other hand, python in debian is a metapackage that depends on a default version of python (say 2.3). Upgrading the system would result in two versions of python installed side-by-side, minimizing breakage (if not prevented at all) that may have occured say if you have compiled your own python modules.
This and other policies are enforced in debian to the package level - and this is the strength that apt-get capitalizes (among other things).
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