[PLUG] Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Released

[Rahul Sundaram]

Manas Alekar wrote:
> *This is not a smart comment.*
> Why did Fedora chose to go the yum way instead of using apt with rpm ? Apt
> is quite matured. I use Fedora and Debian on a regular basis, and somehow,
> apt seems way mature than yum.
> 
> I can understand the spirit of doing it again, and doing it in python for
> porting elegance, but it has been a long time now, and I still do not feel
> as comfortable doing a yum install on a server as I feel doing a apt-get.
> 
> Then again, I might be blinded by prejudice.

There isn't any technical reasons specified for your choices but there 
are for current defaults:

* Red Hat Linux with RPM was first released a decade or so ago. Fedora 
is a extension/continuation of that.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History

Switching RPM to another package manager would break the upgrade path 
and essentially lose out all the tools and collective expertise the 
community has learned around that. RPM as a format also supports a 
number of additional features including multi-lib, file based 
dependencies, triggers etc which .deb doesn't have either deliberately 
or because they are in development etc.

Red Hat and the community around it uses python extensively (anaconda, 
system-config-* tools etc). Red Hat Linux used to include up2date as a 
automatic dep resolver which was written in python. When the move 
towards Fedora was initiated, yum was a much more obvious choice since 
it shared a similar technology and even the same code in some instances 
and apt-rpm was unmaintained, lacked support for multi-lib and has a lot 
of legacy c++ code.

Yum itself is written in python but the core code is still RPM in C used 
via its python bindings. So we get the best of both worlds with core 
efficiency and performance of C with the easy maintenance, portability 
etc of python. This has resulted in yum supporting a number of 
additional features including plugins and a API which is easily reused 
in other system software including anaconda, livecd-tools etc which are 
either not available or way more difficult in other dep resolvers.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/Apt

Note that apt-rpm itself is now maintained by the same Red Hat developer 
maintained rpm.org upstream and now supports the same repository format 
(repomd) as yum and is available in Fedora along with synaptic if you 
prefer that. Smart is also available in the repo.

# yum info apt

Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Available Packages
Name       : apt
Arch       : i386
Version    : 0.5.15lorg3.94
Release    : 3.fc9
Size       : 1.0 M
Repo       : fedora
...

People tend to frequently confusing different technologies. If you are 
comparing Fedora and Debian at the packaging level.

RPM format             ~= .deb format
RPM tool               ~= dpkg tool
yum, apt-rpm resolvers ~= apt-get resolver

Hope that helps.

Rahul