URPMI For Fedora Core 2

Jaroslaw Zachwieja writes "Stefan van der Eijk, the autor of Slbd - automated tool to rebuild distributions to different architectures/processors in a sanitized environment, has published set of RPMS of URPMI for Fedora Core 2. The only usage difference is that it uses hdlist instead of compressed hdlist.cz known from Mandrake. Are we one step further towards Cross-distro RPMS?"

Comments

URPMI does depndancy resolution

[brunes69]

URPMI can do pretty much everything apt can do. It is really no better or worse. Apt has more conveient commands for some things, URPMI does for others.

Same shit, different stick really.

Re:Who needs em?

[ultrabot]

Seriously, is: ./configure
make
make install

Really that hard that we need cross distro RPMS?


configure; make; make install does nothing with dependencies. If you, for example, don't have qt development headers on your machine, it just croaks.

Re:Who needs em?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Seriously, is: ./configure
make
make install

Really that hard that we need cross distro RPMS?''

I hope you don't really think so.

First off, autoconf configure scripts take a long time to run, and if the package is of any complexity, the compilation will also take a long time.

Secondly, all sorts of things go wrong during ./configure. Dependencies can be missing, which you would have to find, fetch, configure, build, and install - manually. Also, configure scripts are usually buggy (omitting necessary checks, and performing many unnecessary ones).

Third, make install is typically run as root. Do you trust the script not to install any trojans? How about ./configure wiping out the files in your home directory? I put more trust in my distributor than in random people who wrote the software. Not even so much that they would put in trojans, but how is the security of their server?

Fourth, software built and installed from source can be a bitch to uninstall. If it installed in its own directory, possibly creating symlinks in /usr/bin et al, this would be easy. As it is, however, they put files all over the place. Good luck figuring out which files belong to the package you want to remove.

Fifth, packages often need some tailoring to fit in well with your distribution (think menu entries, file locations, etc.) With prepackaged software, this has been done for you.

All in all, a good package manager beats compiling from source any day. Debian's package management tools are very very good, and the reason I prefer Debian over any other distro. They resolve dependencies automagically (which RPM-based distro's are finally beginning to get working), and if you want, you can build the package from source with all the tweaks you want.

Re:apt

[rsd]

There is no apt vs rpm as there is no urpmi vs dkpg. it is like comparing a beer (liquid) with a beer can.

APT is a great management tool. But it is not a packaging format/tool.

APT already works with Debian, debian dkpg based distros and some RPM based distros as:
- Conectiva (they ported to rpm and support apt use)
- Mandrake (at least for the cooker)
- Redhat and Suse (thru 3rd party prepared mirrors)

An advantage of URPMI over APT is that URPMI can do small updates instead of taking the
whole package list and putting it in a big "rpm -Uvh" command line.