MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-10-03 |
| FROM | Michael Richardson
|
| SUBJECT | RE: [hangout] The Great Package Management Experiment
|
Thanks Now I can move on.
-----Original Message-----
From: Inker, Evan [mailto:EInker-at-GAM.COM]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 9:46 AM
To: 'Michael Richardson'; hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: RE: [hangout] The Great Package Management Experiment
Simple,
Debian and Mandrake have the best Package Mgmt Systems/Tools
SUSE has the worst...
"Conclusion
To conclude this lengthy and time consuming experiment involving package
installations and distribution upgrades, we have two clear winners - Debian
and Mandrake. Debian is hard to beat when it comes to overall convenience,
but Mandrake has made a lot of effort and its urpmi package management and
underlying technology has just about succeeded in catching up with Debian's.
The other three distributions have a long way to go. Red Hat is currently in
a major transition and the question of package and distribution upgrades is
probably being addressed as I write this. Slackware is easy to upgrade with
swaret, a tool which will be included in the upcoming Slackware 9.1, but it
doesn't handle installing packages from third-party repositories. As for
SuSE, it falls short of all other distributions. YOU has a pleasant
interface and it works extremely well within its official package set, but
as a software management tool, it has too many shortcomings to compare well
with either apt-get or urpmi. "
Regards,
Evan M. Inker (New York) x. 4615
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Richardson [mailto:MRICHARDSON-at-abc.state.ny.us]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 9:08 AM
To: 'Inker, Evan'; hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: RE: [hangout] The Great Package Management Experiment
Ok what does this say (Plain English Please)? Two syllables (or less) words
please.
-----Original Message-----
From: Inker, Evan [mailto:EInker-at-gam.com]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 8:56 AM
To: hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: [hangout] The Great Package Management Experiment
The Great Package Management Experiment
September 24, 2003
This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar
Last week's Revisiting RPM Package Management in the distribution section of
LWN was quickly followed by a heated debate about software management in
various distributions. Predictably, the discussion soon evolved into a
full-scale "distro war", where each distribution was vigorously defended by
its respective vocal fans. This heated feedback resulted in an attempt to
conduct a practical experiment. It will examine the package management tools
in five major binary Linux distributions (Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat,
Slackware, SuSE) and provide examples of 1) installing a package not
officially supplied by the distribution itself and 2) upgrading the entire
distribution to a newer version. Without any further ado, let's get on with
the show, in alphabetical order.
Debian GNU/Linux
I chose MPlayer for the test of installing a third-party package. MPlayer is
a popular media player for Linux, but most distributions do not supply it
due to potential legal issues with certain codecs included in the package.
Debian is no exception. Luckily, visiting apt-get.org and typing "mplayer"
into the site's search engine reveals the availability of MPlayer from a
number of unofficial repositories, as well as instructions for adding the
repository to one's sources.list. In case of Debian Woody, this is a simple
matter of adding 'deb http://marillat.free.fr stable main' to
/etc/apt/sources.list, then executing the following:
apt-get update
apt-get install mplayer
That's all to it, MPlayer is now installed and ready for use.
As far as upgrading the Debian distribution to the latest version, this is
done with a single command:
apt-get dist-upgrade
This is a well-tested, well-documented and reliable procedure for upgrading
a Debian system. The ease of package installation (whether native or
third-party) and system upgrades are often considered to be some of the most
pleasant aspects of using Debian GNU/Linux and this is hard to argue.
Overall score (on a scale from 1 to 10): third-party package installation:
10, distribution upgrade: 10.
Mandrake Linux
Like Debian, Mandrake does not supply MPlayer as part of the distribution. A
quick trip to Penguin Liberation Front (PLF) reveals availability of the
package, together with instructions on how to add the necessary sources to
Mandrake's package manager - urpmi. The site also provides a well-designed
three-step wizard, which enables users to specify a Mandrake version, select
official Mandrake mirrors and choose to add other third-party repositories,
such as PLF itself, Texstar's RPMs and Java RPMs. The wizard outputs a
number of urpmi.addmedia commands that need to be executed from the command
line - a simple copying and pasting those into the Konsole does the trick.
As soon as the execution completes, MPlayer can be installed with:
urpmi mplayer
uprmi mplayer-gui
The first command gives an option to choose between a stable or development
version of MPlayer, which is followed by a prompt to confirm installation of
dependent files. Mandrake's package manager then goes on to fetch and
install all the necessary files. In the test, everything installed
flawlessly and typing "gmplayer" on the command line launched MPlayer in its
full glory.
That was nice, but let's try something more challenging - such as updating
the entire distribution. At the time of the experiment, Mandrake Linux 9.2
was not yet released, but the distribution's development branch called
"Cooker" was very close to what the final Mandrake 9.2 would look like, sans
some last minute bug fixes. I followed the instructions in Cooker HOWTO and
How to Upgrade Mandrake, updated the urpmi sources to point to a fast local
mirror and executed the following commands:
urpmi.update -a
urpmi --auto-select --no-verify-rpm --auto
urpmi kernel
The entire upgrade procedure was a surprisingly pleasant experience. All
completed without a single hitch and when I rebooted the system, I found
myself in a brand new Mandrake Linux 9.2, almost final. Comparing the
upgrade process to Debian, the only downside is that three commands are
needed to upgrade Mandrake, as opposed to a single command for upgrading
Debian. The overall score: third-party package installation: 10,
distribution upgrade: 9.
Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux 9's only package updating tool with dependency resolution is
up2date. This was primarily designed for updating an existing installation
with critical bug fixes and security patches, rather than as a general
purpose package management tool. It is not possible to add third-party
repositories to up2date and non-subscribers require to fill in a lengthy
registration form every few months. But even paying subscribers have
reported frequent failures to connect to up2date servers shortly after Red
Hat's security advisories.
Currently, there are two third-party tools with dependency resolution
capabilities for Red Hat Linux - apt-get and yum. For the MPlayer
installation experiment, I settled on apt, which is trivial to set up on any
recent Red Hat installation - a quick trip to freshrpms.net was all that was
required to download the relevant RPM package and install it manually.
Afterward, installing MPlayer and all of its dependencies was also a
no-brainer:
apt-get install mplayer
As soon as the installation process completed, MPlayer was ready for use.
Next came the task of upgrading a vanilla Red Hat 9 to Rawhide, which is Red
Hat's development branch, probably fairly close to a new beta expected to be
released shortly. Here I chose yum for the job, mainly because yum is now
included in the Rawhide and presumably it will be included in the next
official Red Hat Linux release. The package is also available from
freshrpms.net. After configuring the sources, I issued the following
commands:
yum check-update
yum -t -y upgrade
Perhaps being spoiled by a very easy Mandrake upgrade, I expected a
similarly smooth flow while upgrading Red Hat. Unfortunately, it wasn't the
case. The upgrade proved to be a lot of hard work and here is the summary of
my observations:
One of the main disadvantages of the yum package manager is that it only
works with a Red Hat mirror, which has been "yumified". A yumified mirror
contains a separate directory with header files of every available RPM
package. At present, not many mirrors appear to have been yumified.
The upgrade process aborted with errors on countless occasions. Even a
simple error such as a failure to download a package for whatever reason
brought the upgrade to a halt and had to be manually restarted. Once
restarted, yum went through a lengthy dependency checking period, despite
the fact that no change had been made to the package selection. Also, yum
does not seem to have the ability to re-try fetching a package in case the
first attempt fails.
A major upgrade such as this one can take many hours, but unlike Debian or
Mandrake's package managers, yum gives no indication about the progress or
estimated time left.
Nevertheless, the upgrade eventually completed and I was able to boot into a
newly upgraded development version of Red Hat Linux. Perhaps another
detailed comparison of yum with apt would be useful here, but I'll leave it
for another time when we know more about Red Hat's (or Fedora's) direction
in terms of its package management. Worth mentioning here is an interesting
comment by one of the readers in last week's forums, which deserves to be
quoted here:
Although yum is now in rawhide, I don't expect to see it in a released
version of RHL or RHEL. Why do I say this? Because the newest up2date that
will ship with the upcoming RHEL and RHL now supports remote "yum" and "apt"
repositories in addition to the native "rhn-style" repositories. Since
up2date now speaks all languages (rhn, apt, yum) there is no need to ship
those other tools.
Overall score (2 points were deducted for having to use a third-party
package manager): third-party package installation: 8, distribution upgrade:
3.
Slackware Linux
Slackware's package manager does not have the ability to resolve
dependencies. The MPlayer experiment started with a trip to LinuxPackages,
where I located and downloaded the necessary package, then executed
installpkg:
installpkg mplayer-1.0pre1-i686-2rob.tgz
Although no errors were reported during installation, MPlayer failed to
launch due to missing libraries. Back to LinuxPackages to download alsa-lib,
lame and libdvdread (the dependent packages were clearly listed on the
MPlayer download page), before installing them with installpkg. This has
satisfied all requirements and MPlayer was ready for action.
There are three third-party packages that handle Slackware package updates -
these are swaret, slackpkg and slapt-get. Both swaret and slackpkg have now
been officially included in the "extra" directory of Slackware Linux, but
between the two of them only swaret has the ability to resolve dependencies,
while slackpkg is generally used to keep a Slackware system synchronized
with the "current" branch (i.e. development branch, equivalent to Sid,
Cooker or Rawhide). At this point, it is perhaps interesting to note a
recent comment by Slackware's creator Patrick Volkerding, which indicates
that not everybody thinks highly about advanced package management tools:
"I'm not a big believer in automated dependency handling."
As with all other distributions in this experiment, I wanted to upgrade a
vanilla Slackware 9.0 installation to the latest available development
version, which at the time of writing was Slackware Linux 9.1-beta2. This
can be done with Slackware's native tools, but the process is fairly
involved, it requires manual download of all upgraded packages, which then
need to be upgraded with upgradepkg in a certain correct order. After
downloading and installing swaret, the same could be achieved with two
commands:
swaret --update
swaret --upgrade -a
Again, the process took time, but completed with no errors. Several newly
upgraded packages required extra packages to satisfy dependencies and this
is the only place where user intervention was called for to confirm the
action. But the overall experience was very similar to upgrading Mandrake,
except that it required a third-party tool.
Overall score (2 points were deducted for having to use a third-party
package manager): third-party package installation: 5, distribution upgrade:
7.
SuSE Linux
As many readers correctly pointed out, SuSE's native package manager called
YOU (YaST Online Update), does indeed have dependency resolution
capabilities. My apologies to SuSE users for the erroneous claim to the
contrary. The reason which led me to believe otherwise was the frequency
with which questions about apt-get come up on SuSE's mailing lists. Upon
some investigation, it would appear that the main reason for apt-get's
proliferation and preference among SuSE users is that certain third-party
repositories of SuSE packages encourage users to make use of it. The popular
usr local bin, which provides up-to-date GNOME packages is a good example.
Another major advantage of APT for SuSE is its ability to upgrade the entire
distribution with a single command and without re-installing. According to
this comparison chart YOU cannot be used for this purpose.
Keeping uniformity in the package installation experiment proved difficult,
because SuSE is the only distribution in this list that does ship with
MPlayer. However, some of the useful, but legally questionable components
and plugins are missing from it, so let's try to install a more useful
version, such as the one found at links2linux.de. Unfortunately, attempting
to add the source of the MPlayer package to Software Source Media in YaST
resulted in a "ERROR(InstSrc:E_no_instsrc_on_media)" message. But after
installing apt and its dependencies, and updating apt's sources, MPlayer
installed with a single command:
apt-get install MPlayer
The test of upgrading the entire SuSE 8.2 distribution to a newer version
could not be done, simply because a newer version of SuSE Linux has yet to
be released. It will probably be another two months before SuSE 9.0
directories appear on mirrors to give apt-get a chance to do its magic.
Overall score: third-party package installation: 6, distribution upgrade:
not rated.
Conclusion
To conclude this lengthy and time consuming experiment involving package
installations and distribution upgrades, we have two clear winners - Debian
and Mandrake. Debian is hard to beat when it comes to overall convenience,
but Mandrake has made a lot of effort and its urpmi package management and
underlying technology has just about succeeded in catching up with Debian's.
The other three distributions have a long way to go. Red Hat is currently in
a major transition and the question of package and distribution upgrades is
probably being addressed as I write this. Slackware is easy to upgrade with
swaret, a tool which will be included in the upcoming Slackware 9.1, but it
doesn't handle installing packages from third-party repositories. As for
SuSE, it falls short of all other distributions. YOU has a pleasant
interface and it works extremely well within its official package set, but
as a software management tool, it has too many shortcomings to compare well
with either apt-get or urpmi.
Comments (40 posted)
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
The Skolelinux project will be working with Debian to revive and take over
the Debian-Edu sub-project.
rpmseek.com has announced that rpmseek.com now indexes Debian Linux (.deb)
software packages.
Comments (none posted)
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 34
The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 22, 2003 is out. This
week's issue looks at the Gentoo 1.4 maintenance release 1 for x86, an
experimental IA-64 stage1 that is now available, and much more.
Full Story (comments: none)
Lycoris Desktop/LX Update 3
Lycoris has released Desktop/LX Update 3. This Update features a new Help
Center with interactive audio-visual tutorials, hundreds of updated drivers,
crisper font handling, increased printer support for HP printers, extended
digital camera support from Vivitar and Olympus, auto-configuration of WiFi
connections, and exclusive Signature Wallpapers from Organic Light
Photography.
Full Story (comments: none)
Slackware Linux
Slackware Linux has announced the first release candidate for Slackware 9.1
in Monday's slackware-current changelog entry, followed by RC2 on Tuesday.
It won't be long now, in fact Slackware 9.1 might be out by the time you
read this.
Footnotes reports that Dropline GNOME 2.4.0 for Slackware 9 is out. The
package contains GNOME 2.4, AbiWord 2.0, Gnumeric 1.2, Epiphany 1.0, and a
bunch of other stuff.
Comments (none posted)
Minor distribution updates
Astaro Security Linux
Astaro Security Linux has released v3.220 with major security fixes.
"Changes: This Up2Date fixes the CAN-2003-0693 sshd vulnerability."
Comments (none posted)
CDLinux
CDLinux has released v0.4.5 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The
init scripts were modified to make the booting procedure more flexible.
CDlinux can now boot from almost any IDE/USB device, not only CDROMs. You
can even boot it from a FAT partition. CDlinux can also run in "loop" mode
if there is not enough memory to store the root filesystem in RAM."
Comments (none posted)
CrashRecoveryKit
CrashRecoveryKit has released v2.4.21-mdk91, based on Mandrake 9.1 (i586).
"The ram filesystem for the mdk91 edition is 16 Mb and now needs at least
24Mb ram to boot. In addition the Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
administration tools are added."
Full Story (comments: none)
eMoviX
eMoviX has released v0.8.0 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This
version adds a Spanish version of the README, improves settings for the FB
boot label, improves NVIDIA TV-out, and includes brand new support for
installation on Debian systems."
Comments (none posted)
Fli4l
Fli4l (Floppy ISDN/DSL) has released v2.1.4 with major feature enhancements.
"Changes: Updated to Kernel 2.4.22, uClibc 0.9.20, BusyBox 1.0-pre3,
gtk-imonc 0.6, and Privoxy 3.0.2. PPPoE in the kernel is now the default.
You can use active-filter for ISDN. There are several minor bugfixes and
changes."
Comments (none posted)
INSERT
INSERT has released v1.02 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: INSERT
was changed to boot with isolinux. This makes it possible to include
additional boot options (e.g. for boot floppies) and eliminates the
limitation on the boot disk size (more drivers). memtest86 has been added as
a boot menu option. The cpio and dialog packages have been added (absence of
the latter caused netcardconfig to fail). The links Web browser was upgraded
to version 030709. The catchFirebird script was updated to download Firebird
0.6.1."
Comments (none posted)
KNOPPIX
KNOPPIX has released v3.3-2003-09-22 with minor feature enhancements.
"Changes: AX25 protocol support has been added. The boot option tohd=hda1
has changed to tohd=/dev/hda1 for consistency. There is a new and improved
unofficial installer "knoppix-installer", and a service menu for Samba
exporting. Xchat has been re-added. ddcxinfo-knoppix now uses the extended
monitor modelines from Kano by default."
Comments (none posted)
Morphix
Morphix has released v0.4-1 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This
version now features Gnome 2.4 along with lots of bugfixes, a partial
rewrite of the installer, better themes, toram/tohd bootoptions, memtest86,
supermount instead of autofs, LUFS, direct-install/execute/copy CDROM
directories, a new NVIDIA driver, and more."
Comments (none posted)
Quantian
Quantian release 0.3.9.2 is available. This release adds many new packages
and deletes a couple of others. Click below for details.
Full Story (comments: none)
Recovery Is Possible!
Recovery Is Possible! (RIP) has released v6.4 with minor bugfixes. "Changes:
A few bugs have been fixed and some software has been updated. There's also
a CD version that combines the Linux and FreeBSD systems on one bootable
CD."
Comments (none posted)
Salvare
Salvare has released v0.1.3 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This
release sets up for the 0.3.0 release in terms of architecture changes,
etc.: the boot process is now entirely BusyBox based (which has been
upgraded to 1.00-pre2), the system can be customised using a bootstrap
floppym, and the Debian mirror can be customised during manual
configuration. chkrootkit will no longer report false positives against
Salvare itself (and has been upgraded to the latest version), the network
card probe is less likely to hang certain hardware configurations, and
localisation issues are resolved."
Comments (none posted)
Slackware Live CD
Slackware Live CD has released v2.9.0.22 with major feature enhancements.
"Changes: Kernel 2.4.22 (with XFS support and ALSA drivers) has been added,
so many more network and sound cards are supported now. This release adds
CUPS for printing, mplayer 1.0pre1, and fluxbox 0.9.6pre1, and removes
apache, PHP, and MySQL. proftpd and configsave/configrestore have been
fixed."
Comments (none posted)
uClinux
uClinux has released v20030909 with major feature enhancements. "Changes:
This version features the latest 2.4.22 kernel, platform updates, more apps,
and some cleanups."
Comments (none posted)
Warewulf
Warewulf has released v1.14 with major feature enhancements. "Changes:
Support has been added for various authentication mechanisms (NIS, LDAP,
etc) for the master node. Plugins have been built for Nagios so that node
status can be easily monitored. Tiny RAM disk support using NFS root has
been built (very experimental). Some packages have been added to the virtual
node file system, and some code has been cleaned up."
Comments (none posted)
wrt54g-linux
wrt54g-linux has released v0.2 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes:
Several new executables and drivers were added, including a VPN daemon. An
"options" subdirectory was created for executables that are not installed on
the box by default. A Rendezvous daemon is now started to advertise the new
Web server, and a script for transferring single files to the box was
included."
Comments (none posted)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail.
Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received
this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system.
E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free
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late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not
accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this
message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission.
If verification is required please request a hard-copy version.
This message is provided for informational purposes and should not
be construed as an invitation or offer to buy or sell any securities or
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GAM operates in many jurisdictions and is
regulated or licensed in those jurisdictions as required.
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____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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