Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
YaST, YUM, RUG, APT, SYNAPTIC, SMART, etc.
What's wrong with this picture?
OK. Perhaps I'm getting old. And do not get me wrong. I like choice. But are so many different tools really needed?
Is there a good description of what each tool does that makes it unique from the others?
I think I would find a feature matrix most welcome. Which does and does not do what? Which platform does it run on? What resources will it use and not use? That sort of thing.
Something for the opensuse site?
YAST == Updates through the SuSE system, but only interactively, no cron jobs. YUM == The updater used by RedHat, which now works since SuSE switched over to RedHat's repository style. Has both a gui and marginal command-line support. RUG == The command-line part of SuSE's ZenWorks Management Daemon. Many of us have come to the conclusion that ZenWorks is a thoroughly broken product to be avoided at all costs and was only included in SuSE 10.1 in a misguided attempt to increase Novell's sales of the expensive full ZenWorks Suite. It doesn't bother to check dependencies when removing packages, which could potentially completely trash your system. It also maxes out your CPU for three to four minutes just to check for updates, which zen-updater does every time you login, regardless of whether or not you've told it to only run once per day. Zen-updater also currently crashes when attempting to update through delta-rpms, and possibly others. APT == Command-line updater/manager from Debian. 10.1 is the first release of SuSE with official packages for it. It works great both in cron and on-demand, but no GUI. SYNAPTIC == GUI interface for APT, no packages for SuSE at the moment. SMART == Uses the same system as apt, and includes a GUI, but doesn't have quite the feature list that apt does. FOU4S == Fast Online Update for SuSE. An independently developed system to give a full set of features for YaST updating from the command-line. When SuSE switched to the RedHat style repositories for 10.1, it was broken. The author is current writing a thesis, but hopefully an update for this will eventually be forthcoming, as many many servers on the internet depend on it. From the server/command-line perspective, fou4s cannot be beat. There are several reasons for so many different updaters. Many years ago, there were no updaters. Each distribution created its' own. RedHat created RedCarpet, SuSE built on their installer suite YaST, and Debian created apt. YUM came in a bit later from one of distributions built off RedHat, since RedCarpet wasn't GPL'd (if I remember correctly). APT, initially, only worked with Debians' .deb files, rather than the RPMs used by RedHat and SuSE. Currently, SuSE and RedHat seem to be headed toward a convergence, at least server-side, but it's been somewhat derailed by trying to wedge ZenWorks (Novell's management system going back to Netware, iirc) into SuSE. Honestly, the choice wasn't that big an issue until SuSE 10.1 was released with a broken/crippled ZenWorks. Normally, unless you had a compelling reason, you went with whatever system your distribution recommended and didn't think twice about it. In those cases, it was less a bewildering array of choices and more like "I want my updater to do X, which the default doesn't", so it wasn't hard to find the one that did what you wanted instead. On the other hand, the situation we have now is "The default is broken, pick something else", which leaves people rather in the dark. At this point, I recommend using APT for servers and just using YAST for updating desktops. Currently, that leaves people with no program to warn them of new updates on their desktops, but SuSE claims it's fixing ZenWorks, so maybe that'll be OK for desktops, once it's released.