[Mageia-discuss] Package management system

[Richard]

On Tuesday 28 September 2010 23:42:21 Renaud MICHEL wrote:
> No, if you are talking about rpmdrake, you should compare it to synaptic.
> I you want to talk about apt (be it apt-get or aptitude), you should
> compare it to urpmi, and urpmi (in my opinion) is not slow.
>
Agreed. Though I am not by any means a command line junkie I will always use 
uprmi when I know exactly what I want. 

So it is synaptic/apt and rpmdrake/urpmi. No doubt yum has a GUI counterpart 
too.
>
> emerge and macports are source-based "packet" managers.
> As the programs are compiled when you want to install them, you can decide
> to exclude some optional, compile-time functionality, and avoid their
> dependencies.
>
> In pre-compiled packets (like rpm or deb), the packager decided what should
> be compiled, and so what are the required dependencies.
> You still have the option to get the source package and tweak it (via the
> spec file for rpm, or rule for deb) to exclude some things you don't
> require. (but you will need to do it again each time an update is
> available)
>
Right, I have done this with a custom ffmpeg build. Compile time dependency 
control is, of course, a grace and favour benefit provided by the program 
author. I get the impression that a packager can introduce depencies when 
special support is needed for extra features he may choose to include. This 
seems to be what happened with the 2010.1 issue of the foobillard rpm where a 
new dependency on Pulse has been created which does not exist in the 2010.0 
package or the author's source.
>
> Packages have dependencies, those are interpreted as "this package cannot
> work without those".
> You can also have less strict recommendations, deb has provided for long
> recommended packages (not really required, but a must have) and suggested
> packages (is an interesting addition, but nothing essential).
> Rpm also provide such a mechanism (though I think is younger than deb) with
> the suggested packages.
> Urpmi take the suggested packages into account, when installing it will by
> default selected also the suggested packages, but you can add the --no-
> suggests option to avoid this.
Does this mean that I can find the KDE packages which "depend" on Pulse and 
re-package them such that Pulse is only "recommended"? If so then I will have 
to find the way to set the --no-suggests option in rpmdrake. I hadn't even 
looked for it before as I have only recently started to discover problems in 
Mandriva packages.
> On the urpme side, if you uninstall a package that was installed as a
> suggestion, it won't trigger the uninstallation of the package that
> suggested it.
Something similar seems to apply to packages which I inadvertently "mark" as 
manually installed. urpme reports that such packages will be excluded from 
orphan detection. I love the --auto-orphans switch.

Richard