Mandriva doing too much stuff

[solarian]

which potatoes are better? hard or soft-cooking ones?

Damn it! Now I'll have to think on that for the rest of the day. I got your point though.

Can I still install usual rpm packages just by clicking on them or through a terminal using a command like 'urpmi <package name>'?

[gregor]

It is about integrating Smart Package Manager (not apt-rpm !):

http://smartpm.org/

[adamw]

Yeah, talking about apt-rpm is pointless as we won't be doing anything with it. In the opinion of both Rafael Garcia-Suarez (the urpmi maintainer) and the Conectiva guys, apt-rpm does not have any significant advantages over urpmi. Conectiva was moving away from apt-rpm before the merger, and towards smart, which was written by Gustavo Niemeyer, who works for Conectiva. Rafael's quite impressed with smart, and he and Gustavo are working on some way of combining urpmi and smart; that's one of the major technology changes that will come from Conectiva. But forget about apt-rpm. :)

[Gowator]

apt-rpm does not have any significant advantages over urpmi.

Agreed but real apt does on the server side.

 

The intergration with Debconf is one of the better sides since it leaves your apps actually running and configured. This also translates to less errors for instance when MDK urpmi installs a package with the wrong permissions etc. (mysql running as root etc,) doesn't happen with apt...

 

Its only a couple of mins saving ion config but what it seems to do is force developers and packagers to have less errors whereas leaving the app 'cold' invites them.

[Guest Adriano1]

Rpm allows one to add pre- and post- install scripts. So urpmi could more-or-less-easily add some kind of support for this. It's really an interesting to do.

[tyme]

i thought urpmi did support pre and post scripts?

[Rainer]

Something of interest: Behind the New Mandriva

 

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/5811/1/

 

How would the company respond to complaints from users who believe the new product release schedule will prevent the software from being up-to-date?

 

"This is not true for three reasons. First, our Cooker development platform is updated on a daily basis. As a result, we always have the latest versions of software available in Cooker," Duval responded.

 

Second, the plans call for regular release of "special, up-to-date releases" to contributors and club members. "So with the new release scheme, they will actually get more versions than before," he said.

 

"Third, for power users, we will certainly perhaps release snapshots of Cooker through Community releases, more than once a year," according to Duval.

Edited April 11, 2005 by Rainer

[adamw]

to translate from the Gael ;), that's:

 

1. There's Cooker

2. We're planning to do specially built targeted updates for the Club

3. We might do Community snapshot releases for everyone

 

I don't know how much is really decided yet, it's a way in the future before the question arises. First issue is building 2006 and getting it out of the door.

 

of course we use %pre and %post (and %preun and %postun and all sorts of other scripts), it'd be bloody hard to maintain a distro without 'em :). gowator's beef is more to do with communication and packaging errors than anything, it's not that urpmi or MDV doesn't have the capability. I haven't seen anything like that happen in a long while though (i.e. a package from main installed in a way which prevents an MDV tool from working). there _are_ such situations, but they usually involve contrib. For instance, we have beagle in contrib, but it doesn't work out of the package as we don't enable extended attributes on the /home filesystem by default. If beagle were moved to main this would obviously be fixed, but since it's an unsupported contrib package this hasn't happened yet.

[Gowator]

i thought urpmi did support pre and post scripts?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It might but the dkpg supports apt and visa versa.

This means everything is taken care of in the install.

 

Like I say in most cases it actually only saves you a few minutes of finding and configuring the server app but this in itself seems to force better scripts.

Its full user interaction (according to your verbosity level set for deb conf) so it asks you name of server etc.

If you install say a mail server or webmin etc. it prompts for names, ports and all that good stuff so that its up, running and configured. I found with urpmi it installs but often just stops or the popst install script hangs... because it has a dependency on a certain user or its trying to install as root and the app will not run as root etc. etc.

 

debconf is a lot more than just a script as well.

 

edit

sorry adamw, just so your comment.

Its just really server stuff that seems to suffer and perhaps the fact the scripts when run are invisible (they might make log files)

If debconf runs and had a problem then it is solved at the time or not. It will ask if you want the packagers .conf or the existing OR if you want to edit one or the other right now...

Urpmi handles a lot in pre-scripts such as choosing which dep.. etc. but it doesn't give as much user feedback...

I guess the more complex the package the more this is needed.

 

Personally I don't see MDK (up to now) as a server distro but as a noobie distro.

These tools are less likely to be installed ...

 

This is just my impression though...

to be honest I was amazed at the detail in debconf but it was actually perhaps offputting at first.

If you don't know what it is going to ask then its kinda putting you on the spot... and initially IO prefered the silent URPMI... only slowly did I realise that if I answered the question the server app would actually be configured and running...

[adamw]

We don't use interactive scripts like that, no. RPM does have the capability AFAIK, it's a design decision for MDV not to do it. What's supposed to be done is that if any user steps are required, they be put in the urpmi.txt (I think that's what it's called...) file. This is a special file which is output to the console during package installation, so if you have to do anything to make a package work, the packager can tell you about it here. The overall goal, though, is for everything to work out-of-the-RPM.

 

I use MDV for some server stuff (my home machine also runs my personal website at http://www.happyassassin.net/ along with a mail setup including fetchmail, procmail, postfix, cyrus-sasl, courier-imap and squirrelmail for web access) and I've been pretty happy with the quality of the packaged server apps; they all installed fine and work fine. Having said that, I can certainly see benefits in the Debian approach, I'm certainly not saying we're right and it's wrong. I don't think anyone would argue that in all situations MDV is a better choice than Debian, I can certainly see myself recommending Debian to people (heck, I do it all the time). Running a medium-level server setup in a very pedal-to-the-metal way at low cost would certainly be one of those situations, if they were starting from scratch. I'd do it with MDV as I'm more comfortable with that, but whatever.

[scarecrow]

If you want to taste apt-rpm/synaptic on the current Mandrake release instead of urpmi, it's quite easy (some MDK based distros use it since quite some time ago) but I don't see any advantages over urpmi worth talking about.

[Guest Adriano1]

Well, according to a debianist friend of mine apt-get is so much better than urpmi it's not in the same galaxy. Oh, wait. He compared apt-get with rpm, not with urpmi. When I said "if I have to use 'rpm -Ivh package', then you can't do anything but 'dpkg whatever'. He didn't understand. When I explained RPM had changed a wee bit since '98, he didn't get it. He pointed at some docs explaining how bad RPM was... In 2002. I proceeded to show him the docs for current urpmi. He _still_didn't_get_it_. That's when I quit trying to discuss.

 

Venting? Moi?

[Gowator]

If you want to taste apt-rpm/synaptic on the current Mandrake release instead of urpmi, it's quite easy (some MDK based distros use it since quite some time ago) but I don't see any advantages over urpmi worth talking about.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think as adamw has said RPM just doesn't have that capability.

apt != UrpmI because there is a whole load of support and helper progs behind all of them

 

I must stress on userland progs I see no difference but the organisation of the package lists in Mandrake is way way better than Debian which has 9000+ unsorted packages ... not so neatly grouped and organised as Mandrake.

 

In this respect and especially for a noobie URPMI (++) beats the full debian apt (++) hands down.

 

If you want 1-2 server apps then its evens and when you are building a server then Debian Stable is a great choice... (tho I also have a gentoo minimal one with no X etc.)

 

Overall URPMI is a great resource and especially for noobies.

The #1 tip I give to ALL noobies here is configure your URPMI sources... and you get a new distro!!!

This is a pure technical thing - in fact the marketing is pretty shoddy at drawing peples atention to it (obvious;ly else so many noobies wouldn't be coming asking how to install a tarball when they could just urpmi <latest and greatest>

 

What I have to say though is for advanced (read not noobie) config the full debian/apt/debconf/dbpg is more flexible... even though for compiling it doesn't have all the options of portage it can actually download, compile and install a source file... if I hadn't used portage I woulda been speechless.

 

However what I have found is package quality is often better in Debian, especially when comparing testing and cooker. Not the progs are better just the detail of having to make it work without any external user ineraction seems to focus better?

To me URPMI is great... and I think apt4rpm is a waste on a Mandrake system (its different if you have Suse or FC) because URPMI really is as good as you can get wih the restrictions of RPM's...

 

If mandrake change I would really say go the whole hog... full apt, debs and dpkg and all the utils like debconf... (though it can be called drivelconf) (sorry couldn't resist)

 

Personally unless they want to exploit the midlevel (read el-cheapo no money in it so why bother commerically) server market then I don't see the point....

[adamw]

testing and cooker isn't really a fair comparison, sid and cooker is closer. Even then, it's not entirely fair as debian do a little more work outside sid (in experimental) than MDV do outside cooker, as far as I can tell. testing is pretty much comparable to MDV stable in freshness and stability, I reckon :)