Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (297 mails)

[Jan Kupec <jkupec@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm getting with this to the factory list as I don't want to bother
> > 'regular user support' in the opensuse-ML.
> >
> > Everybody nowadays is talking about how much better zypper would be
> > compared to rug/zmd.
> > Can somebody just in short tell me where the advantage is? Ok: it does
> > not use the zm-daemon, but this one is running quiet nice in 10.2
> > (didn't have to many probs yet.. or I'm not aware of them...)
> >
> > On the other hand, with zypper, I always have to su just to install a
> > single package.
> >
> > That's something I like about rug for example: I can add a catalog as
> > su, subscribe to it, and from there my users are allowed to grab
> > packages. Without knowing the su password. But they are not allowed to
> > install an rpm using rug (at least that was what my test showed me: it's
> > ok to INstall from a subscribed catalog, but nor from a local rpm)

zypper was meant as a lightweight replacement for rug/zmd for users who
don't need complex enterprise level sw management. Rug uses zmd (which
runs as root) to perform this task, so it does not need to be run as
root itself. For this kind of task rug is the preferred tool.

To add a bit to zypper's drawbacks, the fact is that currently you need
root privileges also to perform a search query with zypper. But this one
is planned to be fixed.

> > And in overall, rug feels 'faster' for me compared to zypper. This
> > especially as zypper, whenever I do something like zypper lu or zypper
> > se, refreshes the catalogs. There seems to be no caching at all or it's
> > not working for me. and this makes zypper quiet slow. rug OTOH just
> > gives me the requested output. The fact, that an update can happen on a
> > repo just in the time between the last refresh, is quiet low. I admit,
> > in some cases this lead to unresolvable dependencies.

This is an unfortunate feature of libzypp which manifests in both yast
and zypper and we are working on solution.

In fact libzypp does not refresh the sources all the time, only if
changed. The thing that causes the delays is parsing of the cached
meta-data. This will be solved ASAP and will take that burden off yast
as well.

> > So: I'm looking forward to hear some other statements, maybe
> > corrections.

Apart from the above drawbacks, zypper is an alternative for users who
don't need special functionalities offered by ZLM and want a command
line tool for perfoming simple software management tasks. With zypper,
users are not annoyed by waiting for the zmd daemon to wake up when they
needed to use rug occasionally. Also there are several annoying bugs in
rug, which zypper doesn't have.

Last thing to add is that zypper is still in an early development stage
and will improve.

hth

-- Jan Kupec, YaST team
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