What's bad about RPM's?

[Robor]

I'm about a week into my Linux experience. I installed and played around with Ubuntu last Monday/Tuesday and have been using Fedora Core 4 since then. During that time I've been doing *a lot* of reading and I've come across more than a few people who do not like RPM based installs but I haven't seen anyone say why. What is bad about an RPM based install and what is the advantage of using something else?

Coming from a Windows background (download file, run setup, etc) it took a while to understand the whole repository concept but since then I have been using 'yum install program' and so far so good. What is bad about this method?

Please not that I'm definitely not trying to start an argument here. I just want to know why some people don't like that method of installing software and also know if there is a better method.

 

[sourceninja]

I know their not as bad as they used to be, but i'm still against them from all my years hunting down random rpm files on the internet for dependancys. I'm all about debs or ebuilds now.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
I know their not as bad as they used to be, but i'm still against them from all my years hunting down random rpm files on the internet for dependancys. I'm all about debs or ebuilds now.

Compare package managers to package managers or package formats to package formats. Comparing stand-alone RPMs to apt-get or something is just silly.

RPMs aren't bad, just some people had bad experiences with them in the past before a good package manager was written.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Robor
I'm about a week into my Linux experience. I installed and played around with Ubuntu last Monday/Tuesday and have been using Fedora Core 4 since then. During that time I've been doing *a lot* of reading and I've come across more than a few people who do not like RPM based installs but I haven't seen anyone say why. What is bad about an RPM based install and what is the advantage of using something else?

Coming from a Windows background (download file, run setup, etc) it took a while to understand the whole repository concept but since then I have been using 'yum install program' and so far so good. What is bad about this method?

Please not that I'm definitely not trying to start an argument here. I just want to know why some people don't like that method of installing software and also know if there is a better method.

Most of those ppl that you have heared like the guy that posted here talking about bad old experiences only,since then apps like yum have emerged / improved, offereing better reseloution for dependency issues and what not.
Those who are talking about experiences from a long time ago, was becasue instead of using an app installer(like yum), such options weren't much available / poor in quality, and to install an app if you had a dependecy issue you would go around looking for missing rpms to manually install.

I like rpm distros becasue :

1- RPM hell is much colder than it used to be, showing a move towards progess and an effort being put into it.
2- If I ever found an app that wasn't available in a repo I can just download it and double click it , installed and done.
3- I can easily port apps between different PCs .
4- Alot of companies release drivers and apps in RPM format, and for other distros they give you the source code and you have to compile from source, alot of ppl don't know how to do that.
5- Building on point 4 since RedHat is the sponsor of the Fedora Core 4 project, alot of companies support Fedora Core 4 as the major free Linux distro, giving an advantage to it's users, as I have noticed.
6- RPM distros such as Fedora Core 4 are very easy to use, and can satisfy the desires of the Linux savvy and the average user.

Just me 2 cents 😉.

 

[nweaver]

It's from the old days. I still tend to shy away from RPM based distros cause of RH9 (my learning distro) and hunting down specific versions of libraries so I could install/compile an app.

 

[Nothinman]

RPMs themselves are fine, it's the higher level tools that have problems. Most people dislike them because of past experiences before up2date, yum or apt. With any of those tools and a decent repository RPMs are fine. The problem is that yum is mind-numbingly slow and FC has an extremely small official repository so you have to look to 3rd parties for a lot of packages and since packages have pretty much full reign of the system when they're being installed I don't like to trust 3rd party repos.

Ubuntu and Debian have ~17000 packages available in their repos, Debian just needs the official ones and Ubuntu needs the main repos plus universe and multiverse which aren't officially supported but they're pretty much just rebuilt Debian packages so there's very few problems with them.

 

[Robor]

Ah, I see. So the RPM's aren't so bad (anymore). I have run into a few problems with yum sometimes being very slow (I'm talking dialup speeds or less) but it's been okay recently. Also had some attempts to 'yum install xxxxx' and had the repositories time out or not be able to find xxxxx program. I've got another HD with Ubuntu still loaded on it at home. Maybe I'll check it out as well. Never hurts to know how 2 different distro's work, right? Thanks!

 

[Nothinman]

I don't mean network wise, I mean just normal operations are slow. For instance 'apt-cache search' takes 1s, how long would 'yum search mozilla' take?

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I don't mean network wise, I mean just normal operations are slow. For instance 'apt-cache search' takes 1s, how long would 'yum search mozilla' take?

A yum cache search took 13 seconds , I know it's slow as balls, but how many packages did apt find ?

This is how much I got.

 

[Nothinman]

A yum cache search took 13 seconds , I know it's slow as balls, but how many packages did apt find ?

$time apt-cache search mozilla | wc -l
229

real 0m0.648s
user 0m0.590s
sys 0m0.050s

I can post all of the packages if you want, but it seems kind of pointless.