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Debian's apt-get vs Mandrake's urpmi?
Deven Phillips asks: "I have been using Linux-Mandrake for quite a while now, and I wanted to know what Slashdotters think of the two rival package management systems available for Mandrake: apt and urpmi. I have been playing with both (apt is available in the Contribs section), and I have to say that so far urpmi is winning. I have always heard that apt-get is the best, so I am surprised by my conclusions. Am I missing something? Is apt for RPM not as mature as the deb counterpart?" I, for one, would have liked to have heard the reasons as to why Deven feels that urpmi is superior, but maybe there are a few of you out there who feel the same way, that can communicate this as well as he can. For those of you who have tried both, what features do you like out of the two of them, and which tool serves your needs the best?
I just used it the other day for the first time, and pkg_add (on OpenBSD, and I'm sure a few others) is absolutely wonderful. All you have to type in is the full name of the tgz file, which can be on a local disk or an ftp server. NOTHING could be better than that!
Moderators: I _hope_ you see the satire.
Mark Duell
Real men just download the entire contents of slackware-current :)
Actually, I would say that the two packages are functionally equivalent, since the "cross pollination of ideas" was more than evident in this case. So, both Debian and Mandrakesoft can be commended in their creation of two very nice software management system. Most people would say that apt-get is the equivalent to the "install-anywhere" program so prevalent in Windows. Development of easy installation programs such as these help improve Linux's acceptance in the IS world today.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Mandrake 8 (and possibly earlier releases) comes with a tool called MandrakeUpdate. It's a rather nice GUI tool similar to Ximian Update, for all you gnome users. I haven't tried it much due to my 80 gig hdd croaking, but from what i saw it was pretty nice.
I am !amused.
2) Lets not forget the ports collection on FreeBSD. Installing a port is as easy as:
locate (portname)
cd /user/ports/(area)/(portname)
make install
All dependancies addressed for you. The port tree can be kept up to date with cvs. It's a great system. The maintainers seem to keep it relatively up to date, but just far enough behind that there are very few security scares.
Is emacs better than vi?
Is gnome better than KDE?
Is AMD better than Intel?
Is Mandrake better than RedHat?
Is red better than blue?
OK, enough for now... Let the flames begin.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Asa frequent user of mandrake, I have to say that MandrakeUPdate is a very usefull and powerful tool. Nice GUI, ability to select Stable or Cooker (Development) updates, and good dependancy checking and filling make it awesome. apt-get is ok, but it lacks a fancy GUI. My favorite ssytem thouhg, howver, si the FreeBSD ports collection. Simply "make" the package, and it downloads and compiles the program, and any depdancies you need! Thus, you always have the source handy. I like this alot better then binary distribution systems.
When people talk about how great apt is, they're really talking about how great Debian as a whole is. One thing that really impressed me in to moving from Mandrake to Debian a while back was that Debian felt whole. It was a system, where Mandrake felt like a bunch of packages thrown together.
With apt, you not only get your package dependencies solved along with the latest software, you get the work that was put in to making Debian a coherent system that adheres to the Debian policy. You get a specific maintainer for each package who will (almost) always respond promptly to emails about bugs and such. You can get a ton of help on Debian's mailing lists. You yourself can even become a maintainer if you've got the gusto to do so. Granted, Mandrake covers a lot of these areas (and has a nicer install) but Debian feels like a system, where every other distro I tried just felt like a bunch of packages. Granted, I haven't tried Mandrake in a while, but somehow I just don't think what they're doing will match up to Debian's volunteer maintainer model, even now.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
When people say "apt-get" is best, they usually arn't referring to the tool itself. While it is a decent tool(as is dpkg, which is what does the actually package installation and maintenance), what really makes Debian so good is the packages themselves.
:) What I *am* saying is that the tool used to install the packages is a fairly minor issue. What's more important is the time the maintainers put into the packages themselves.
:)
All Debian packages are put together by volounteers. Of course, some get paid. But I don't know of any that are currently getting paid, that wern't volounteers first. apt-get is just a tool. What *really* makes the difference is the time spent on the packages themselves. Mandrake, Red Hat, and the rest only have so many people. Each has to take care of dozens of packages. They just can't spend as much time on them. In Debian, most of the ~7000 current packages, most maintainers just take care of two or three related packages. They usually use them, too. So most maintainers take their time and do things right.
I'm not saying Red Hat or Mandrake arn't any good
That being said, apt-get was written from the ground up with dpkg in mind. It can be ported to use rpm(obviously), but I don't doubt that urpmi works better(when it comes to dealing with rpms)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I don't know much about dkpg, but everytimes I hear about it users seems very positive, I can't say so about urpmi.
I'm using Mandrake 8.0, I've update quite a few packages from Mandrake's Cooker and now my systems doesn't work very well: I have to tell it twice otherwise it won't shutdown, I can't hear music anymore, etc...
But who is the culprit urpmi or the packages?
It's hard to tell!
BTW I'm currently trying to uprade urpmi to see if it will works better: no luck urpmi downloads everything then I get "Installation failed" the file "XXX.rpm" doesn't exist even if I see that the file was previously downloaded! Aaaarrrggg...
I can probably fix all these problem, but it is going to cost me a lot of time and I'm tired of always fixing something in the Linux/Mandrake configuration.. Maybe I'm ready for Debian..
You learn something new everyday. As a former Debian user, I was getting pretty pissed off at having to manually install dependencies with RPM all the time. I'd don't at all like the slow and ugly GTK+ interface, I'm a KDE/command line person, and I uninstalled all that stuff. Now I learn about this "urpmi" thingy and I must say I'm red in face thinking about all the time that I've wasted with rpm. Holy cripes, why doesn't Mandrake inform its users better? Everybody knows about Debian apt-get, Debian advocates never fail to mention it, yet I've never ever heard of urpmi until now. What is wrong with this picture? Yet Another Clueless Bastard
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
urpmi works great to install a new package. But I never got it to upgrade the distribution. Going from Mandrake 7.0 to Mandrake 7.1 for example, was always very complicated. It was not working right when I added different repository, like the kde newest version.
I never had those problems with Debian. I started with potato and upgraded to woody with no pain at all. Not even a reboot. I now have the freashed kde available and it is very easy to keep up with what is new.
Thought I may have been a poor user of urpmi, it's lake of upgrade capability was the key in my decision to switch.
I guess you should probably use the package installer that's native to the distribution you're using. That way you can be sure to get all the right bits, with the correct libs, etc...
The good thing with debian is that almost everything you're likely to need is right there on their servers, you don't have to go and find the packages on some server somewhere. For example I wanted to install apache and squid last week, I typed one command, it downloaded all the stuff, and within a minute or two of waiting for the downloads (I didn't have to type anything) both were configured and running. If your system is also that easy, then stick with it.
Hmm.
Yet this comment gets moderated as Informative, and Insightful. Makes you wonder if the moderators even bother to read the articles.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Do people really use apt-get directly instead of dselect? Why?
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
one thing that turned me off from mandrake is the fact that they tinker with their rpms a lot. things get installed all over the place. you can't (or at least they recommend that you don't) use redhat rpms because they are not "optimized" for mandrake, which i think means that they don't have things shuffled around in them. the net result for me is that i would get confused because all documentation on the internet would tell me to do something and then i would try it and it wouldn't work...because those instructions don't apply to the special mandrake packages. debian is more standardized, and therefore, if i have trouble with configuration or what-not, i can just run a google search and learn how to fix it. for me personally, this is a huge plus not just for the apt-get system, but for debian as a whole.
While I would have to agree with the crowds of Debian users here that apt-get is indeed a superior tool to whatever Mandrake is using these days, I would have to disagree on the ultimate choice of best software package management system.
Now, Linux is a great operating system in general, and I love the apt-get part of Debian in particular, but why does it have to be on the command line? I hardly think that the average person, say, my grandfather, for example, would be able to deal with learning all the arcane aspects of a command line utility. To most, it is just too frustrating, poorly documented, and complicated. What we really need in a modern operating system is a package manager that the average Joe or my grandfather could use.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned Windows Update yet? Not only is it a fully graphical tool, but it automatically detects what software your computer needs, without sending that information to a third party, and then gives you an easy install wizard to update everything. Sure, some things may require a reboot, but there is a lot of Linux software that also requires a reboot to function properly. Personally, I think it is a far superior tool to apt-get, because it can also make recommendations on what kind of cool new screen saver you might want to check out, or update DirectX to improve your gaming framerates and such.
And, of course, it is very handy for patching all those security holes that invariably pop up in MS software, such as the notorious Outlook holes that have caused more than one system administrator a headache. Think about it, if an update tool is easy enough for the average user to utilize, then we won't have to worry about upgrading everyone's Linux machines when the latest BIND or Sendmail exploit hits Bugtraq. It would greatly improve the image of Open Source software when no one goes on a massive hacking spree and compromises a ton of machines for their DDoS wars.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Slashdot.org today announced their latest Internet portal EverythingSlashdot.org which will focus on answering the legalities of everything digitial.
The strange thing about your comment is that everything.slashdot.org actually exists. It's an online information database written and edited by the world. And yes, it has a good writeup about DMCA and the politics of copy protection.
But be warned: The quality standards on Everything are MUCH higher than on Slashdot. In fact, E2 and Slashdot could hardly be more different.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes there is: MandrakeFreq is a semi-stable release of Mandrake-Linux for folks who want to have the newest stuff, but do not dear installing cooker.
--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What you're complaining about is Debian's extraordinarily long release cycles and its notoriously old packages when any given Debian distro is finally released. However, there are some extenuating circumstances you've failed to mention or notice (I honestly don't know which).
Overall, I think Debian's package-management system is excellent. It only took one ill-fated attempt to add XFree86 to a Red Hat machine to convince me that rpm's file-based dependencies are inferior to dpkg's package-based dependencies.
i've used dselect since my first Debian installation in 1997, which also happened to be my first Linux.
i like getting a description of the package, being able to key-word search through the descriptions since i don't always already know what something is called.
surely there is enough room in this idea-space for everyone to use the one they like?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I was installing mandrake 8.0 last night, and managed to stuff up the config file for cups and my simple solution was to reload the rpm.. Or I thought it was, RPMDrake refused to delete the package (hanged big time) and there is no option to install over a corrupt file. The problem with this package was it lacked lots of features that the command line rpm has. So I downloaded the tar file from rpm.org and got a working version.
My experiences with debian (some what limited), is that sure it doesn't have all the nice GUI (or at least when I used it), but it works. I loved how it would automatically download the dependencies, and do a bloody good job.
I do like the mandrake package otherwise, such as there flashy splash screen whilst starting up.
A history of the eternal battle of red versus blue, in different contexts.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
"Red! No, blue! Aaaaahhhh!"
Red: 1, Blue: 0
The Matrix:
"Take the Blue pill and you wake up and believe whatever you want to believe. Take the Red pill and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Red: 2, Blue: 0
Pokemon:
Charizard, a fire pokemon, is weak to Blastoise, a water pokemon
Red: 2, Blue: 1
Google:
Searches for "red": 23.6 million
Searches for "blue": 17.3 million
Red: 3, Blue: 1
Cold War:
Red = Commie Bastards!
Blue = Good Americans!
Red: 3, Blue: 2
It seems that Red has still eaked out a narrow win over blue... For this time!
-Ted
That's correct. If you have testing it the sources list it would update it. The feature isn't in potatos apt(ironically enough), but the newer version should allow you to selectivly upload to packages in testing or unstable. The big problem is that core libraries of often upgraded to versions incompatible with the libraries in stable
I have put all of my system packages on "hold" , so they do not get changed at all. Then if I want something new and improved, like galeon, I just hit `+' in dselect to select galeon, and it shows me a list of packages which I would have to upgrade if I want galeon. I inspect it and decide whether to unhold them or not. Easy.
Regard,
Zooko
As root:
/etc/crontab
1) su
- type in password
2) echo "0 6 * * * root apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" >>
And you'll always get the updates.
As other people said, I've never HEARD of urpmi. There's one thing I have to give Mandrake credit, though - I learned linux off of that distrib, but that was after I was too confused on Debian's SETUP, not apt-get (that too, considering I was only on dialup, and I didn't download their CD images because I couldn't find it, being the linux-newbie I was. Cable made the difference)
Don't listen to what other people have replied :)
/etc/apt/sources.list . Putting a Woody or Sid "deb" line into your sources.list to get just one or two packages is fairly dangerous.
:) Just a "deb-src" line. 'apt-get install', 'apt-get upgrade', and those, use "deb" lines. 'apt-get source', 'apt-get -b source', and those use "deb-src" lines. :)
:)
;)
Anyways, you're partially correct. If you want to run Potato, don't put a Woody or Sid "deb" line in
But I wasn't talking about a "deb" line
Now, 'apt-get' always gets the newest version of a package available, *if* a newer version is available. It won't replace what you have on your drive with and older version. Simple as that
Have fun
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
First, Mandrake distros (with exception of "corporate server" and "MandrakeSecurity", which target different public) are always extremly up-to-date, while debian takes forever to issue a new distribution.
;-)
.-) And.. do not bother porting urpmi to debian - it will be just as useless there, as apt is on a Mandrake system.
Obviously, slower developement cyclus means that there is more time to take care of details... Unfortunate side-efect is that many "stable" debian packages tend to be very obsolete.
Second, there is no such thing as third-party debian package, while third-party rpm packages are abundant. Quite obviously, updating a system with tons of third-party packages is a rather difficult task.
Third, average debian user is far more knowledgable than average Mandrake user. (He has to be, simply because getting a debian system up and running is by far more difficult than doing the same thing with Linux-Mandrake.) Therefore, things which some Mandrake user reports as "evil mandrake stuff" (like: I installed some cooker packages, had to force the install, because it kept requiring some "dependencies", and guess what? now my system is broken!!!) would never be reported as such by debian users.
There is more, but I think you got the message: things aren't as simple as they look from a high debian-guru ivory tower.
As for apt-get and urpmi question, things ARE rather simple: urpmi is better than apt if you use Mandrake distro, simply because Mandrake distro and urpmi were built with each-other in mind. I can think of only two cases when using apt-get on mandrake distro makes sense:
1) ex-debianers which are familiar with apt will obviously prefer to use the known tool
2) urpmi (and co.) make a local database of all rpm repositories, and updating the DB takes some time. Therefore, apt may be a better tool for people who often update their systems using cooker rpms. (this may have been adressed already, I haven't checked lately.
In case you use Debian, there is no urpmi, so apt is definitively better.
The real question is not "which package system is better?", but "which distribution does the best job of managing their releases and updates?"
I don't care what system they use - my priorities (aside from correctness issues) are:
I don't want to install 30 packages just to get PHP working. And why does every single Red Hat app seem to require Apache (RPM) and PHP (RPM)?
And avoid requiring ancient versions of, say, zlib, that won't play well with newer apps.
That is, does it present dependencies clearly and show you release notes and advisories. I'd like to know *why* Apache has been updated, so I know if it really affects me.
If I have to resort to source in an emergency, it defeats the whole point of packaging.
By the way, I'm a huge fan of source installs for apps, becuase I find them much easy to configure and upgrade than packages. But I'd love to use RPMS if it were practical.
-Loopy
Setting up the network is a part of the install process. Debian's install sucks. Mandrakes is way better. Nobody denies that.
But with a
When I was running Mandrake Cooker, I knew quite a few people who had to frequently start from scratch and re-install. Then there were those of us who used apt-get. ;-)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
For those not in the know on Debian:
Stable: security upgrades and other REALLY solid upgrades only. You are expected to perform a dist upgrade from time to time because otherwise you will have really old packages. However, NOTHING EVER BREAKS EVER.
Testing: You get reasonably well tested updates and security updates. Your box is cutting edge. Things still don't seem to break ever, but notice ever is not capitalized anymore. This is more stable than any other distribution's stable.
Unstable: Not just cutting edge, bleeding edge. Perl may break. Dpkg may break. But mostly things will still hum along, with an occasional hiccup. Power users will want unstable on their workstations - not on production servers. This now has recent mozilla, konqueror, kword, gnumeric, and other production apps that are changing reasonably fast right now.
"Rebooting" is a red herring. I can obviously switch to run level 1 and do pretty much anything (short of changing the kernel), but I've killed off my computer's functionality. At that point my escape from my BIOS's POST sequence is a little Pyrrhic.
For instance, if I want to upgrade my X server, I have to kill every (non-console) program I'm using. Yeah, sshd is still up and running, but I don't run a server box, I run a workstation, so I could really care less.(If your box is primarily a network server, you're not upgrading the X server anyway; you're upgrading some network service, and the loss of *relevant* functionality is similar. I tend to segregate my servers from my workstations; if you just have one machine doing it all you might appreciate the fact that your friends can still download your mp3s while your productivity drops to zero.)
This is similar to how kids claim that their super-stable Linux box has enjoyed 14 months of uptime while their Windows box crashes weekly. Maybe so, but if your window manager or web browser crashes three times a day under Linux (not too unlikely), it has a lot more of a negative impact on your productivity and pisses you off a lot more than having to sit through a POST once in a while.
I obviously agree that Linux is lightyears ahead of Windows in terms of the granularity of service disruptions imposed on you by upgrades. I just wanted to rant a little ;)
Why? Why must this be so? Linux is not an OS unto itself, only the foundation of one. Why can we not make room for the different ways people work? Why must it always be one "right" way, and everything else is wrong?
I like Debian. I might give friends who use Mandrake or RH some shit for doing so, but in the end, it's their choice. Debian is my choice. Why must choice be bad?
Oh yeah - the Windows users who can't make a choice, and don't understand anything about what they're doing. I don't know about you, but I've found what I like, and everyone else should be able to choose as well, not have the "one true way" shoved down their throats.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
(my attempt at writing a childish troll)
NeXT File bundles rule, packages drool. Friends don't let friends reinvent the M$ registry.
(troll complete. awaiting negative karma)
Second, there is no such thing as third-party debian package, while third-party rpm packages are abundant.
:)
Of course there are third party Debian packages. I see project sites all the time these days offering their own deb packages. Additionally (and even better) they offer their own apt-get URLs for people who wish to use their third-party Debian packages. Currently, my sources.list includes three such lines. One for E17, one for efm, and one for gabber.
Third-party packages was also the only way to get KDE packaged for Debian until it was finally included.
Now of course, they will not be nearly as abundant as RPMs simply because of the number of RPM-based distros out there, and the ease of making RPMs as opposed to DEBs. But they are there, even if there isn't a debfind.net yet
Between 7.2 and 8.0 Mandrake switched to a newer version of the glibc (2.2, I think). As a rsult, all of their binary rpms now require that version of the glibc to run.
I've been unable to upgrade from the previous glibc to the more recent one with the rpm system. I've also been quite surprised to see that the two versions of the glibc files actually share the same name (libc.so.6).
As a resultt, I can't install Mozilla 9.1 as a binary rpm. I could probably compile from source, but I think that rpms were created exactly to avoid doing that !
Does Apt-Get work better in that regard ?
Thomas Miconi
Then I went to upgrade my desktop box to Mandrake 7.2, and the install just croaked, repeatedly. It just would not load on my SMP, all SCSI machine. After two days of messing about without any success, I just got pissed off with it. Mandrake seemed to me to have put all the effort into surface glitz while ignoring the underlying engineering. Then I stuck a Debian CD into the drive, and it just booted, loaded, and ran, and I've never looked back.
I don't want glitzy GUI interfaces; I want solid engineering that works every day. Although I've been bitten a couple of times with Debian 'unstable' and now stick to 'testing', I'm still hugely impressed with the overall feeling of solid quality with Debian. All my new servers this year are Debian (most of my older servers are still Mandrake, because they are working and there hasn't - yet - been any need to reinstall them).
Mandrake and the other commercial distributions, like AIX and Solaris and SCO, are essentially maintained by small groups of people working for pay to targets and deadlines set by masrketing. Debian, like Linux, is maintained by a large group of people working for the fun of it to deadlines they set themselves. I believe that the reason Debian is better than Mandrake is the same as the reason Linux is better than AIX and Solaris (yes, I have AIX and Solaris boxes too): fun is a better motivator than pay.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
If anyone is having probs getting apt from the mandrake contribs to works, in the file
k e-devel/i586 Mandrake cooker
k e-devel/cooker/i586 Mandrake cooker
/etc/apt/sources.list
change the line
rpm ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandra
to
rpm ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandra
Ports is probably my favorite by far. I have run into problems using apt-get to install non-debian hosted packages like KDE. This is an irritation
for projects that require many packages to be installed.
Ports is really flexible in where it downloads source code from which is then patched upon download and built locally and installed. It also gets all the dependencies it needs along the way.
http://www.freshports.org is a good site to watch how many port updates occur each day and all the new ones. Its pretty up to date but that as it does with Debian packages depends on the port/package maintainer.
Dave