-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Hutchins Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 9:10 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Package Management

On Thursday 18 November 2004 05:39 pm, Brian Densmore wrote:

...

Not that portage isn't a great package management utility. It's far far better than rpm.

RPM and Portage are almost completely different tools for very different ... It would be more realistic to compare Portage to up2date, urpmi, or YaST.

Ok, if you want to get technical, then let me restate.

Not that portage isn't a great package management utility. It's far far better than up2date, urpmi, YaST, or *any* other RPM-based package management system.

But in the end, apt is still better and easier to use. The apt learning curve is much smaller than portage. Although I understand that BSD has what is considered the best. Of course this is all subjective (for the most part). You like gentoo and portage? More power to you. You like urpmi? Wonderful. I like apt.

Here are my reasons: 1) It took a half hour to learn everything I need to know about apt to be expert and efficient at using it; 2) it took me less than an hour to make, test, debug, and install a debian package (it worked and installed and was recognized by dpkg and apt), complete with dependency handling; 3) it is robust enough to be able to fix broken installs without having to trash everything, so far; 4) it requires very little thought to install anything; 5) it doesn't require days to upgrade because everything needs to be compiled.

Sure there are a few things that require a bit of work, such as installing a package not in the official lists. But simply adding the source information in a text configuration file for a non-authorized debian package and running 'apt-get update && apt-get install <custom package>' installs it, and afterward running 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' will handle updating all installed packages including the custom ones.

IMNSHO, Brian D.