Apt as a cure-all. Was: installation KDE3.0

[Peter Hutnick]

On Saturday 13 April 2002 02:52 pm, Amir Tal wrote:
> search for apt-get. its ported from debian to redhat, and can update your
> software, taking care of your dep's for you.

Woah!  I know a lot of people swear by the apt system, but I am disturbed by 
how often I see it prescribed as a panacea.

First, and I don't know the answer to this, how does apt-get on Red Hat cope 
with the fact that there are /no/ apt packages installed at first?  The first 
time you try to install something is it going to go out and get (potently 
older versions than your RPMs) of glibc (and probably perl and ncurses, etc)?  
Like I said, I don't know, maybe it is smart enough to read your RPM 
database, but I haven't seen this addressed.  How ever it works, the fact 
that people suggesting apt never address it worries me.

Another thing that apt bigots don't seem to realize is that folks that are 
used to RPMs are used to being able to use a cross section of RPMs from a 
variety of sources.  Once you throw your lot in with apt you are stuck with a 
limited number of apt resources.  And you will likely find yourself making 
choices that you don't want to make.  "Hmmm, if I want to get Apache 2.0 by 
apt I have to cut over to the "this stuff mostly doesn't' work" repository to 
satisfy a boat-load of upstream dependencies . . . I wonder how many things 
are going to break?"

RPM doesn't have a silver bullet for this problem, but you can usually get 
RPMs for cutting edge software with mostly stable dependencies.  With apt it 
is much harder to selectively run cutting-edge packages on a generally* 
stable system.  Which, in my experience, is what the vast majority of people 
actually want to do.

This is not meant as a flame or a troll, apt puts RPM to shame in a lot of 
ways, but I think that if RPM is the disease and apt is the cure the disease 
is preferable in a significant percentage of circumstances.

I have a final, general comment about apt that is not specific to this 
situation.  That is that apt is /fabulous/ about handling deps _as long as 
you stick with a single repository_.  So much of the "dependencies are 
magically resolved" stuff is just as true of RPM based distros if you only 
install packages off the install cd.  Yes, apt will walk up the dependency 
chain and RPM won't, but both are just as subject to /real/ dependency hell 
of getting packages from different sources to work together.

-Peter


*This raises another issue.  There are really two kinds of dependencies.  
First, there is the simple "link-time dependencies" which boil down to "There 
is no reason we can't link against an older version of this lib, but we 
didn't, so you have to update."  The other is "hard dependencies" meaning "We 
use feature bar of foolib extensively, and bar wasn't introduced until foolib 
a.b.c."  RPMs are generally linked against whatever libs are shipped with a 
specific version of a given (stable) distro.  Apt packages are generally 
linked against the libs in their repository.  This often creates an 
artificial need to "upgrade" a significant chunk of a system to unstable 
packages when there is no technical reason to do so.
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