[opensuse] the fundamental SuSE package management tools?

again, as a relative suse newbie, i'm wondering what people consider the *fundamental* package management tools in opensuse/SLES/SLED. from a long history with red hat/fedora, i can do anything i want with "rpm" and "yum". i'm not a big fan of graphical front ends, when those two commands will do pretty much everything i need. when i recently got into debian, my first reaction was ... what the heck? dpkg. apt-get. aptitude. dselect. etc, etc. so i learned the minimum of what i needed, and that was fine. with suse, so far, i'm working with "rpm" and "zypper". david rankin highly recommended installing "webpin" so, in a nutshell, what do people consider the must-have package management utilities for suse systems? thanks. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry. Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ======================================================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
with suse, so far, i'm working with "rpm" and "zypper". david rankin highly recommended installing "webpin" so, in a nutshell, what do people consider the must-have package management utilities for suse systems? thanks.
rpm, zypper, yast. /Per -- Per Jessen, Zürich (16.1°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 10:57 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
with suse, so far, i'm working with "rpm" and "zypper". david rankin highly recommended installing "webpin" so, in a nutshell, what do people consider the must-have package management utilities for suse systems? thanks. rpm, zypper, yast.
Ditto. I've never had the need to use anything else; zypper is a very solid tool and if you have used yum it is pretty much `sed "s/yum/zypper/"` -- OpenGroupware developer: awilliam@whitemice.org <http://whitemiceconsulting.blogspot.com/> OpenGroupare & Cyrus IMAPd documenation @ <http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/wmogag/file_view>

On Tuesday 29 September 2009 03:50:31 am Robert P. J. Day wrote:
again, as a relative suse newbie, i'm wondering what people consider the fundamental package management tools in opensuse/SLES/SLED.
Robert, as everyone has stated rpm, zypper and yast. What I would add is, do yourself a favor and learn zypper from the command line. It is much more flexible than the yast gui interface and a ...whole lot faster when you know what you want to do. zypper help then zypper help topic (example: "zypper help in" for install options) The zypper man page is good as well. If you don't know yet, you can just open up konqueror and type "#manyouwant" in the URL location and you can view man pages in a nice gui format (example: #zypper) will bring up the zypper man page. The good thing about it is all the related program links, etc. are all hyperlinks in the gui so you can easily jump to where ever you need to go with a single click of the mouse. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday, 2009-09-29 at 04:50 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: ...
again, as a relative suse newbie, i'm wondering what people consider the *fundamental* package management tools in opensuse/SLES/SLED.
from a long history with red hat/fedora, i can do anything i want with "rpm" and "yum". i'm not a big fan of graphical front ends, when those two commands will do pretty much everything i need.
Unfortunately, you can not resolve dependencies with rpm the same way as was possible a few years back, because the information is no longer there. Previously, an rpm package contained the info about what packages it depended upon. Now, instead, it references the libraries it needs, and a package manager is required to find out what packages provides those libraries, pulling the information from the repositories metadata. So, you need zypper (command line) or YaST (qt, gtk, or ncurses) as package managers; either of them use the same libzyp to do the job, although YaST does some things differently working somewhat on its own. Then there are other tools: the "old" pin to find packages, the new "webpin" that does the same, but looking on all repositories. There is another alternative package manager, I think its called "smart". I haven't tried it myself, so I can't talk about it. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkrDqUUACgkQtTMYHG2NR9Xd/wCdH/mLUhsncx+RbxhaL9kaVqXN HWkAoIRokwuBTaXo8kpwxGVHWvw0/QYb =dxzO -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 30/09/09 14:53, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Previously, an rpm package contained the info about what packages it depended upon. Now, instead, it references the libraries it needs,
It still does, except for libraries, and that is of course a feature ;) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Carlos E. R. wrote:
Previously, an rpm package contained the info about what packages it depended upon. Now, instead, it references the libraries it needs, and a package manager is required to find out what packages provides those libraries, pulling the information from the repositories metadata.
Wether you call this a disadvantage depends. It was definitely a way to lock installs to just one distribution. But RPM itself *is* of course enough to resolve it, you just have to pipe all the requirements through an 'rpm -q --whatprovides'
There is another alternative package manager, I think its called "smart". I haven't tried it myself, so I can't talk about it.
smart is (was) the better apt. I used apt4rpm with my early SuSEs, then switched to smart (which was slower, but indeed much smarter than apt when it came to resolving problems). With 11.0 I switched to zypper and it outperforms smart in speed, and from my impression so far it's at least par with it in smartness... Cheers, Pit -- Dr. Peter "Pit" Suetterlin http://www.astro.su.se/~pit Institute for Solar Physics Tel.: +34 922 405 590 (Spain) P.Suetterlin@royac.iac.es +46 8 5537 8534 (Sweden) Peter.Suetterlin@astro.su.se -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (7)
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Adam Tauno Williams
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Carlos E. R.
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Cristian Rodríguez
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David C. Rankin
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Per Jessen
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Pit Suetterlin
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Robert P. J. Day