Package Managers

[Jeremiah Summers]

I'm creating a new thread for this.. Just to let you guys know I have a Chroot that I am working with and I have built multiple RPM packages etc... with at this point I am seeing what base packages I must build as RPMs to create a Chroot from multiple RPMs.

Currently I am using uClibc and GCC 4.8.3 (which will be updated at some point)

I have looked into DNF which is the current Package manager for Fedora and of course uses rpm. However it requires (for timed jobs) SystemD. That's a no go for me as I don't want SystemD as a base requires. Maybe default back to Yum, but when will it be unsupported?

As for not using RPM I have looked at ipkg files (basically lite debs) and a few others I lean towards RPM because that's what I am familar with, as a Linux Administrator, but that doesn't mean it's the best choice.

I am really looking at multiple avenues here. What's easy to learn, to deploy and has the best user facing side (GUI). Also what's something that won't leave us high and dry in a few years?

What do you think? And why?

[Kaleb]

How is the smart package manager doing? Used that for quite a while for unity.

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[Jeremiah Summers]

Kaleb great to see you! smart's last update was 1.5 I think that was a while ago, but I dod find this:
https://github.com/smartpm/smart and this http://smartpm.github.io/smart/

[Jeremiah Summers]

If we use smart.. how are we looking on the GUI side of things, is there anything new offered?

[devnet]

Honestly there isn't much out there in the form of GUI for rpm...OpenSuse has YaST with Zypper and Fedora has yumex....though I'm not sure how good yumex is having only fooled with it once on a LXDE respin.

To be honest, if you're giving up the MCC...I'd say import and use YaST and pull more heavily from OpenSuse.  Not sure if it is possible but it makes sense to me.

________________________________________

    

devnet

http://linux-blog.org

[jesus manuel hernandez]

I would like to consider this http://apt-rpm.org/ as an option to smart,its really easy to use and have more options

[devnet]

Guys, Smart was great in the past...but it has not been actively developed and neither has apt4rpm.  Both of them are ANCIENT and are not being developed for new versions of rpm.

In my opinion, something else needs to be implemented that is being actively developed, updated, and has continual improvements being introduced to it.  If you guys are into using outdated, unpatched, broken software...by all means, Smart and apt4rpm are the way to go.

[JMiahMan]

Dev is pointing to one of the major issues I have found.. the other is a front-end. If Unity-Linux expects to allow users, quazi developers to create something usable to family and friends then it has to have a decent front end. I'm not saying we can't have these other options in a repo, or even better yet that you can't create your own using smart, apt-rpm, yum or what have you (as they are all rpm based) but I need something I can build tools around. I was going to go with DNF, Fedora new Dandified Yum Version but it pulls in SystemD and for the lite guys, there's better Init systems (uselessD). I could easily go with Yum, but I don't know how long the community is going to support it now with DNF being around. There's other options out there, we could even go with deb files etc.. I am going to look closer at Zypper and yast so far I am seeing Zypper pull in three major depends Boost, Libzyp and Augeas. I have packaged two out of three of those (Augeas and Boost) in time past. I'm just not sure about Yast and there front end. 

If there's some awesome change in development with smart (ie. a decent front-end) or apt-rpm (just development in general) by all means let me know and I will look deeper into those.

Kind regards

Jeremiah

[JMiahMan]

Looks like they have rewritten yast using ruby, which is awesome news. Who creates their own language and writes their configuration tools in it.. I guess Suse does.. or at least did. In a perfect scenario Yast and Zypper offers us something similar to Mandriva's MCC, but it seems more modular, can use multiple GUI toolkits (GTK and QT) and is written in a pretty easy language to modify. I'll look into it more tomorrow and see how far I can get in compiling Yast and Zypper on my Fedora system, I think if I can get it to work on a Fedora system. If it works on Fedora I can get it to work in Unity. Here's their repo https://github.com/yast , I think that would be a pretty big announcement. That I know of we would be the first Linux Distro outside of Suse to run Zypper and Yast.

[JMiahMan]

Alright I was able to get Zypper to work on my Fedora machine and it was rather impressive (fast). I think I may got with it, we will see about yast2 more in the future, but it's very nice that option is there as a front end for package management and a control panel.

[Jeremiah Summers]

I went with Yum... in the end. Other options are always on the table, yum is just very widely known and doesn't have as complicated depends as DNF, or Zypper. It was a lot easier to build. I was going to go with lib-hif (DNF's back end) but it seems there's still some issues with MUSL, when Yum just works.