.deb vs .rpm (or apt-get vs yum)
It's been many years since I last used a .rpm based distribution in anger, but the experience lead me to dislike them compared with .deb based distros. In particular I had a number of occasions where an installation issue lead me to a system that I could not fix, where that has never happened to me yet in all my years with .deb-based systems (Debian and Ubuntu). Sure I've had conflicts and problems, but I've always been able to get pas them. Am I right to trust .deb more than .rpm? Should I give (eg) Fedora another chance? Incidentally I also found package management faster with .deb (eg apt-get update vs yum update, apt-get install vs yum install). Stable beats speed but .deb seemed to give me both. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On 23/09/14 16:03, Mark Rogers wrote:
It's been many years since I last used a .rpm based distribution in anger, but the experience lead me to dislike them compared with .deb based distros. In particular I had a number of occasions where an installation issue lead me to a system that I could not fix, where that has never happened to me yet in all my years with .deb-based systems (Debian and Ubuntu). Sure I've had conflicts and problems, but I've always been able to get pas them.
Am I right to trust .deb more than .rpm? Should I give (eg) Fedora another chance?
Incidentally I also found package management faster with .deb (eg apt-get update vs yum update, apt-get install vs yum install). Stable beats speed but .deb seemed to give me both.
I got badly burnt on a live SuSE system some years ago, and have never been near an RPM-based system since. They are ok as long as you don't deviate from the norm. In my experience, they are vulnerable to catastrophic library and dependency problems if you deviate from the "approved" packages, and especially is you compile something from scratch. I started using Gentoo some 14 years ago, and have never looked back. I've been using Ubuntu and derivatives as well for a year or two, and haven't had any of the same problems. Sadly, most contract assignments specify RH/Fedora or CentOS, and I not only have little experience (FreePBX is the limit) but no inclination to work with them again. FWIW. Cheers, Laurie. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------
On 23/09/14 16:03, Mark Rogers wrote:
Am I right to trust .deb more than .rpm? Should I give (eg) Fedora another chance?
Incidentally I also found package management faster with .deb (eg apt-get update vs yum update, apt-get install vs yum install). Stable beats speed but .deb seemed to give me both.
On 23 September 2014 16:44, Laurie Brown <laurie@brownowl.com> wrote:
They are ok as long as you don't deviate from the norm. In my experience, they are vulnerable to catastrophic library and dependency problems if you deviate from the "approved" packages, and especially is you compile something from scratch.
Sadly, most contract assignments specify RH/Fedora or CentOS
My employer has their own .rpm disto, which is therefore the preferred platform for their products (at least on x86), and so I do a lot of work with it (<disclaimer>all views here strictly personal!</disclaimer>). As Laurie says, if you stick to the straight and narrow then .rpm systems are fine. However, I still prefer to use Debian where possible (at work), and pretty much exclusively at home. Every six months or so I go on a "distro walk", flirt with something else, get hacked off and then come back to Debian. Cheers, Ewan
On 23 September 2014 17:59, Ewan Slater <ewan.slater@gmail.com> wrote:
As Laurie says, if you stick to the straight and narrow then .rpm systems are fine.
However [...]
By this point I was expecting some counter arguments from rpm fans but as it appears they're either quiet or non-existent it looks like I'll be sticking with .deb based distros for the foreseeable future. Thanks for the comments; it's nice to get a fairly clear cut response on something I figured might be far more divisive! Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On 26 September 2014 11:25, Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote:
On 23 September 2014 17:59, Ewan Slater <ewan.slater@gmail.com> wrote:
As Laurie says, if you stick to the straight and narrow then .rpm systems are fine.
However [...]
Hi Mark
By this point I was expecting some counter arguments from rpm fans but as it appears they're either quiet or non-existent it looks like I'll
Only just read this conversation as I've been rather busy for a while. The fair answer is along the lines of 'all things considered' i feel - no distro is quite what i'd like. Plus one should bear in mind desktop or server use - learn a distro well was what Dr Jeep said to me when I first started using linux and I still agree with that. I'm not an IT graduate so I am not basing my views purely on the technical side. i started with ubuntu with 6.10 in early 2007. I always thought it was the best but over the last couple of years I think they've gone downhill in various ways. There's lots to consider; package management, usability, 'polish', upgrading etc. I started with Synaptic and apt on the cli but have found problems. As for rpm dependency hell I think it's fair to say that is a thing of the past. Yum is slower but it 'chugs' through updating whereas apt is quicker. Apt still leaves orphan's i find although the addition of option 'autoremove' almost eliminated it. Aptitude is the best debian package management but that has its faults... too clever by half! I have done a bit of distro hopping just to compare and most times I have come back to xubuntu (since 2010... never tried unity but wanted to avoid 'bloat and bling'). Centos may be good for a server but not so good for a desktop... it's a server distro and for that it's great. Their repos don't have a lot of packages that i'd like on a desktop. Debian is both but... i won't give my view for personal safety reasons! Package management I like most is the modular one which helps make a distro more stable but the distros... have other problems e.g. like one-two person maintenance and if ill? Mint xfce had that problem. The main distros apart from Mint have the backup but that could have been remedied by now. salix is good, Vl is good but still the same problem. Main distros are best regarding support. Six month upgrades I've got fed up with and found an annual upgrade about right for my uses. i dislike the attitude with 6 month releases - stick out 20th of the release month whatever... Ubuntu has been bad sometimes and Fedora 18 or 19 wouldn't even load from CD. ubuntu now only do updates for 9 months so one cannot miss out a release.... use LTS you may say - I found bugs in 12.04 which weren't sorted. One gripe I have is most debian based distros use debian repos and thus 'sponge off them' which i don't like on principal. RPM use their own which I prefer. Suse, nothing against it but I didn't like the way their repos were set up. Ubuntu appear to have dropped synaptic which I like (software centre is not my taste). Gslapt was close to synaptic and either is still my preference. So what have I changed to for desktop use? The distro-hopper-stopper is it's nickname - it is rpm and v.stable so far. Also an annual release and few bugs so far. Another clue - synaptic for package management. Finally i've got a scanner to work... messed about on ubuntu for ages.
Thanks for the comments; it's nice to get a fairly clear cut response on something I figured might be far more divisive!
Hope that's fair! as for debian... safety reasons!!! But I'm moving away from Suffolk shortly so doesn't matter really. james
On 26 September 2014 13:14, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 September 2014 11:25, Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote: Main distros are best regarding support. Six month upgrades I've got fed up with and found an annual upgrade about right for my uses. i dislike the attitude with 6 month releases - stick out 20th of the release month whatever... Ubuntu has been bad sometimes and Fedora 18 or 19 wouldn't even load from CD. ubuntu now only do updates for 9 months so one cannot miss out a release.... use LTS you may say - I found bugs in 12.04 which weren't sorted.
I've pretty much standardised on LTS for anything other than personal deskop/laptop and haven't really had any problems. Since I have pretty much decided to stick with .deb package management (because it's what I know and there doesn't seem anything better) that limits my choices really to Debian, Ubuntu and Mint. As far as Mint is concerned their decision not to support in-place upgrades has ruled that out (LMDE would be fine as a rolling distro though, one day I'll probably try that). This is the thing about .deb package management: I've had cause to do some pretty rough things with it (like upgrade Ubuntu versions skipping one or two releases because it's been left until the intermediate releases have ceased to be available) and although I've had problems it's generally been OK (and usually we're talking virtual machines which are easy to backup and roll-back if it goes wrong). I just don't have that kind of faith in .rpm. I've learned to get used to Unity now (and I find KDE annoying more than I expected) so I think that determines my direction, but if it weren't for their use of rpm I'd have given Fedora (and maybe SuSE) much more of a chance. But isn't it great to have a choice! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On Sat, 27 Sep 2014, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 26 September 2014 13:14, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 September 2014 11:25, Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote: Main distros are best regarding support. Six month upgrades I've got fed up with and found an annual upgrade about right for my uses. i dislike the attitude with 6 month releases - stick out 20th of the release month whatever... Ubuntu has been bad sometimes and Fedora 18 or 19 wouldn't even load from CD. ubuntu now only do updates for 9 months so one cannot miss out a release.... use LTS you may say - I found bugs in 12.04 which weren't sorted.
I've pretty much standardised on LTS for anything other than personal deskop/laptop and haven't really had any problems.
Since I have pretty much decided to stick with .deb package management (because it's what I know and there doesn't seem anything better) that limits my choices really to Debian, Ubuntu and Mint. As far as Mint is concerned their decision not to support in-place upgrades has ruled that out (LMDE would be fine as a rolling distro though, one day I'll probably try that). This is the thing about .deb package management: I've had cause to do some pretty rough things with it (like upgrade Ubuntu versions skipping one or two releases because it's been left until the intermediate releases have ceased to be available) and although I've had problems it's generally been OK (and usually we're talking virtual machines which are easy to backup and roll-back if it goes wrong). I just don't have that kind of faith in .rpm.
I've learned to get used to Unity now (and I find KDE annoying more than I expected) so I think that determines my direction, but if it weren't for their use of rpm I'd have given Fedora (and maybe SuSE) much more of a chance. But isn't it great to have a choice!
-- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
In place upgrades is something I've not done as... from what I've read it's not recommended. So if you've had no few problems all I can say is you are lucky. I've always installed from CD/DVD live; doing the gparted disk check first and then installing. Most of the posts on ubuntu forum and mailing list is because people haven't done an md5sum/sha256sum check on an iso burn or upgrade. The 12.04 to 14.04 seems to have lots of problems. "But isn't it great to have a choice!" But the choice isn't so great. Each distro has it's problems. I'd like a slackware based one as the modular system is more stable than deb or rpm. I don't think there's a great difference between the two. james
On 27 September 2014 19:52, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
In place upgrades is something I've not done as... from what I've read it's not recommended.
I don't see any fundamental reason why an in place upgrade should cause any more problems than any apt-get upgrade except that more things get upgraded in one go. And I've never had any problems that weren't related to the new distro itself (eg that it no longer supported my old video hardware), ie they'd have hit me regardless of whether I upgraded or went for a fresh install. A quick spin up from a LiveCD before the upgrade is a good idea for that reason (although I'm normally too lazy to bother). My attitude is that as long as important stuff is backed up I should try the in-place upgrade, and if it breaks I wipe and do a clean install, which is where I would have started anyway otherwise.
So if you've had no few problems all I can say is you are lucky.
On the contrary, it is down to the robustness of apt package management, and the work that Ubuntu developers (in my case) put into making it work; it's not just luck that I've been doing in place upgrades since 5.x on various hardware and none of the problems have been more hassle than doing a fresh install. (That said if anyone else tries it and it fails it's not on me, ok?!?)
I've always installed from CD/DVD live; doing the gparted disk check first and then installing. Most of the posts on ubuntu forum and mailing list is because people haven't done an md5sum/sha256sum check on an iso burn or upgrade. The 12.04 to 14.04 seems to have lots of problems.
Which is of-course one step that you don't have when doing an in-place upgrade; no CD download, no issues burning the disk.
"But isn't it great to have a choice!" But the choice isn't so great.
Consider the alternatives though. Hate Windows 8.x? Tough. Like iPhones but don't want a huge one? Tough. Don't like Unity? Try Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, ... Also, you expressed concern that Mint doesn't have many people behind it; but realistically how long would it be before it was forked in the event that development stopped. I agree that none of them are perfect and sometimes you just wish that instead of competing efforts on different products we could have all that effort go into one, but the joy of FOSS is that you can generally pick the best bits of each and combine them - quite often right down to a a source code level. Since "best" is always going to be subjective there's always going to be choice. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On Sun, 28 Sep 2014, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 27 September 2014 19:52, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
In place upgrades is something I've not done as... from what I've read it's not recommended.
I don't see any fundamental reason why an in place upgrade should cause any more problems than any apt-get upgrade except that more things get upgraded in one go. And I've never had any problems that weren't related to the new distro itself (eg that it no longer supported my old video hardware), ie they'd have hit me regardless of whether I upgraded or went for a fresh install. A quick spin up from a LiveCD before the upgrade is a good idea for that reason (although I'm normally too lazy to bother). My attitude is that as long as important stuff is backed up I should try the in-place upgrade, and if it breaks I wipe and do a clean install, which is where I would have started anyway otherwise.
Hi Mark All I was referring to is the volume of problems folk seem to have had on the ubuntu mailing list. If you're happy with *buntu fine we don't need to fall out. Linux is about choice and I'm no longer using *buntu. james
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:09:10AM +0100, James Freer wrote:
All I was referring to is the volume of problems folk seem to have had on the ubuntu mailing list. If you're happy with *buntu fine we
Sure, but lots of people use Ubuntu, if you take into account how many people have successful upgrades who don't post to the mailing list then maybe there are many many more of them? Adam
On 30/09/14 10:45, Adam Bower wrote:
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:09:10AM +0100, James Freer wrote:
All I was referring to is the volume of problems folk seem to have had on the ubuntu mailing list. If you're happy with *buntu fine we
Sure, but lots of people use Ubuntu, if you take into account how many people have successful upgrades who don't post to the mailing list then maybe there are many many more of them?
Indeed, and although I use mostly Gentoo on servers, I really like Mint Cinnamon on the desktop. I recently did some upgrades from 16 to 17-LTS the "long way", and it was really easy. See: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 There are also people who have upgraded in situ using apt, see here: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/62 Cheers, Laurie. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, 30 Sep 2014, Adam Bower wrote:
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:09:10AM +0100, James Freer wrote:
All I was referring to is the volume of problems folk seem to have had on the ubuntu mailing list. If you're happy with *buntu fine we
Sure, but lots of people use Ubuntu, if you take into account how many people have successful upgrades who don't post to the mailing list then maybe there are many many more of them?
Adam
Maybe - many folk also didn't notice the goutput**** bug that wasn't sorted throughout 12.04. I've noticed how buggy *buntu has got since 2010 and it's got worse. Since they shortened the intermediate release life to 9 months one has got to install each release. *buntu's no longer my choice. Upgrading has certainly been more of a problem 12.04 to 14.04 than others. james
On 2 October 2014 22:55, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe - many folk also didn't notice the goutput**** bug that wasn't sorted throughout 12.04. I've noticed how buggy *buntu has got since 2010 and it's got worse. Since they shortened the intermediate release life to 9 months one has got to install each release. *buntu's no longer my choice. Upgrading has certainly been more of a problem 12.04 to 14.04 than others.
james
Unity + Amazon ads finished Ubuntu for me. Thankfully there are plenty of alternatives to Ubuntu!
On 27 September 2014 19:52, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
"But isn't it great to have a choice!" But the choice isn't so great. Each distro has it's problems. I'd like a slackware based one as the modular system is more stable than deb or rpm. I don't think there's a great difference between the two.
I tried Slackware recently. It was fun in a retro way for a bit, but the lack of package dependency management and the slackbuilds system soon got tiresome. So my geriatric laptop is back to running Debian / XFCE. Cheers, Ewan
On Mon, 29 Sep 2014, Ewan Slater wrote:
On 27 September 2014 19:52, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
"But isn't it great to have a choice!" But the choice isn't so great. Each distro has it's problems. I'd like a slackware based one as the modular system is more stable than deb or rpm. I don't think there's a great difference between the two.
I tried Slackware recently. It was fun in a retro way for a bit, but the lack of package dependency management and the slackbuilds system soon got tiresome. So my geriatric laptop is back to running Debian / XFCE.
Ewan
I found Slackware a bit 'retro' as you say. Salix is an alternative and Porteus could well develop into the main distro of the slack family. james
On 30 September 2014 11:31, James Freer <jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com> wrote:
I found Slackware a bit 'retro' as you say. Salix is an alternative and Porteus could well develop into the main distro of the slack family.
OK - will check them out the next time I feel the need to go walkabout
participants (5)
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Adam Bower -
Ewan Slater -
James Freer -
Laurie Brown -
Mark Rogers