-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Carl Hartung wrote:
On Monday 12 September 2005 08:37, houghi wrote: <snip>
This is getting very confusing. I personally like the Yast Repositories better an easier to use: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories
It /is/ confusing to me sometimes, too, so don't feel bad. The way I've organized it in my head and on on my systems is YaST handles "official" SUSE packages, including the unsupported supplementary sources and security updates, and I use apt/synaptic to handle everything else.
Ok, as this topic is poping up quite often, let me give some background on all that. YaST2 installs packages from YaST2 metadata repositories. It's as simple as that ;) Those are called "installation sources" in the YaST2 jargon. That "metadata" comprises data for every package that's provided, such as: - - package name, version and release number, what architecture - - summary and description - - dependencies to other packages - - what it provides to other packages etc... Novell provides installation sources for 10.0: http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS-RC1... http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS-RC1... (those are from the uni-erlangen mirror, the primary source being ftp.gwdg.de) Those are the "official", supported installation sources for SUSE Linux, that include the packages that are shipped within the SUSE Linux distribution (except for the "inst-source-java" installation source: it includes packages that are not shipped on the SUSE Linux OSS distribution, because they're not OpenSource, but AFAIK installation of those is also supported by Novell). The other installation sources are commonly referred to as "3rd party repositories", where "3rd party" means: not made nor maintained nor supported by Novell. Two examples of these: Packman and my site ("guru") (and there are a few others, just to lazy to put them all in here ;)). We 3rd party repository maintainers have several options on how to "offer" our packages to everyone's use: - - http/ftp download: Download the files yourself, and install them e.g. with the rpm command-line ("rpm -i ..."). We all have that but it's not the best option as you have to solve the dependency issues yourself. - - YaST2 repository metadata: SUSE includes a few scripts to generate and maintain it (although it's not the simplest metadata format to handle, let's hope for/make better tools). - - APT repository metadata: To be used by the RPM port of APT (commonly referred to as "apt4rpm" although that's not correct: "apt4rpm" is the server-side package that includes the tools to generate the repository metadata - the APT client (used to install packages) is "apt" or "apt-get"). - - YUM repository metadata: YUM is a tool similar to APT that has originally been written by Yellow Dog Linux (a distro specialized on PPC) and which has been adopted by the Fedora Core project as their primary package installation frontend. - - RedCarpet repository metadata: Red Carpet is a package management frontend developed by Ximian (now Novell as they have been bought by the latter). All of these package installation frontends have different repository metadata formats, which means that if I, as a 3rd party repository manager, want to give the users the choice of the frontend they want to use, I have to generate the metadata for all of them. And that's what part of us actually do (except for YUM). Note that for the package repositories hosted at ftp.gwdg.de (and that's most of them), Eberhart Moenke does the hard work as he is generating the metadata over there. For YaST2 and RedCarpet, we are generating it ourselves (at least the Packman team and I do so). BTW, I call these (yast2, apt, yum, red carpet) "frontends" because that's what they are. Not in a sense of being GUIs(*) or CLIs(**), but because in the end, they all use RPM to actually install (or remove, or upgrade) the packages. (*) Graphical User Interface (**) Command-Line Interface The benefit of that approach is that never mind which frontend you use, or even if you mix them, it all works just fine because RPM is doing the low-level stuff for all of them. You don't have separate package databases, it's all RPM. Note that with "mix", I mean once installing a package with "rpm -i", then with "apt-get" (or it's GUI "synaptic"), the next one with YaST2 (or y2pmsh), and eventually the other one with Red Carpet (or its CLI frontend "rug"). It all works. So, in the end, it's a matter of choosing the frontend you prefer. And, obviously, if you have 3rd party package repositories that you like to use, make sure you choose a frontend those repositories have metadata for. ...
How are these related? Is the above the same as Guru, or are there differences?
It's the URL to the YaST2 metadata ("installation source") but it's the same list of packages than if you were using http+rpm from http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser, or apt-get, or Red Carpet. It's a single set of packages but with various metadata formats for the various RPM frontends. Unfortunately they don't all share the same metadata format, but that's how things are (and they're extremely unlikely to change ;)).
In apt there are other suser-* things as well. Can they be used as external Yast repositories or not?
No, not those, because no YaST2 metadata is provided for/by them. They're only available through APT, because Eberhart Moenkeberg is such a nice guy and he spends much time into having the APT metadata generated on ftp.gwdg.de (most of you don't know yet what Ebarhart is doing for you ;)). I know he and Richard Bos are also working on providing YUM metadata, but AFAIC it's not ready yet and as Eberhart is also the maintainer of the primary openSUSE mirror (ftp.gwdg.de), he understandably has other priorities at the moment ;)) BTW, Richard Bos also deserves big kudos here, as he is maintaining the APT RPM port SUSE Linux packages. He'll have to bother a lot less with that now, as Novell has finally accepted to include the apt and apt4rpm packages into 10.0 (thanks!). Note that yum is included in 10.0 as well.
I can't answer this because I still "cherry pick" rpms at Guru's site and install them manually. I do this for most of the "suser-" sources. There are a lot of warnings in the apt documentation and scripts about avoiding "experimental" and "development" level packages which, purportedly, are maintained in several of the 'suser-' sources; warnings to the effect that average non-programmer / non-tinkerer users ought not include those sources lest they end up 'breaking' their systems.
Well, there are a few issues we as 3rd party packagers have to solve. For a short summary of a part of those, read the bottom of one of my previous postings on this list: http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse/2005-Sep/0285.html
YaST and apt are two interfaces into the same package management system (rpm),
Correct.
but I think (could be wrong) the staging of the packages, server-side, is different between the two. I think YaST recognizes and will use a YaST source and, likewise, apt it's own repositories, but I don't think the two are seamlessly interchangeable.
Exactly. They're not interchangeable.
YaST2 is also able to use YUM repository metadata since 10.0, so that might be an option to simplify
the job of the 3rd party repository providers.
I hope all of this helps understanding.
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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