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? -- Roger Oberholtzer
On 25/05/06, Roger Oberholtzer <roger@opq.se> 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?
--
Actually I think that would be an excellent idea. If I had the technical capabiblities I'd put it together myself. Sadly I don't have anywhere near enough skill to do it. I'd be very grateful if somebody who does have the skill would consider the little project. -- ============================================== I am only human, please forgive me if I make a mistake it is not deliberate. ============================================== PLEASE DON'T drink and drive it's not clever, it's just stupid. Kevan Farmer Linux user #373362 Cheslyn Hay Staffordshire WS6 7HR
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?
Too much choice is actually a BAD thing. We have a TV science program 9called Catalyst on the ABC) which broadcast a few weeks ago an experiment conducted by the psychology department of one of our Universities (the one I went to :-) ) where they had on display some 30 samples of jams; people were asked to sample these and then buy the jam(s) they liked. Nobody bought any jams. Then the sample of jams was reduced to just several and people again were asked to taste and buy the jam(s) of their choice. Many sales of the jams were made. The result of the experiment was that when faced with a multi-choice situation people did not make any selections and walked away from purchases because they did not want to make a mistake and possibly buy the wrong product; so rather than be sorry later that they could have bought a better tasting jam they bought nothing instead - and the same applies to all other products. Can you, or anyone else here, relate to this? I can. [rest pruned] Cheers. -- All answers questioned here.
On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 21:37 +1000, Basil Chupin wrote:
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?
Too much choice is actually a BAD thing.
We have a TV science program 9called Catalyst on the ABC) which broadcast a few weeks ago an experiment conducted by the psychology department of one of our Universities (the one I went to :-) ) where they had on display some 30 samples of jams; people were asked to sample these and then buy the jam(s) they liked. Nobody bought any jams.
Then the sample of jams was reduced to just several and people again were asked to taste and buy the jam(s) of their choice. Many sales of the jams were made.
The result of the experiment was that when faced with a multi-choice situation people did not make any selections and walked away from purchases because they did not want to make a mistake and possibly buy the wrong product; so rather than be sorry later that they could have bought a better tasting jam they bought nothing instead - and the same applies to all other products.
Can you, or anyone else here, relate to this? I can.
I can. Having said that, I think that if there was only one jam - no matter how good - a similar result could have been seen. When given no choice one feels trapped and avoids the purchase for that reason. I suspect software does not work like jam. But people are people all the time. In the case of SUSE update tools, I think time will weed out the less usable / feature rich tools. As that progresses, I would like to see what the tools can do. I would offer to make a table, but I know too little about them to provide useful info. Perhaps if we just started listing features seen in any of these tools, a start at a table could be made. -- Roger Oberholtzer
On Thursday 25 May 2006 07:37, Basil Chupin wrote:
The result of the experiment was that when faced with a multi-choice situation people did not make any selections and walked away from purchases... ... Can you, or anyone else here, relate to this? I can.
Hi Basil, Your's is a very perceptive and germane post. IMHO, users want computers to simplify, not "complexify" their lives. A vendor's indecisiveness or unwillingness to put forth a single "best" method results, in practical terms, to the decision being handed off to users, who must then strive to understand the intricacies and ramifications of each alternate solution to determine which is "best" for his or her situation. I agree there is flexibility and 'freedom' on this route but, certainly at it's core, package and updates management isn't an inherently complex objective. I'd much prefer to see this list of 'solutions' boiled down to two, at most, with one being the 'daily no-brainer' that is at least semi-automatic and the other being the one worth studying several nights to understand; the latter providing the ability to perform every anticipated function from a 'point and click' menu /or/ via command line and scripting. my 2 cents, Carl
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.
On Thursday 25 May 2006 15:43, suse@rio.vg wrote: [snip]
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.
Having just caught up with this conversation, I realise that 10.0 susewatcher + YOU, which worked fine, has been removed, to be replaced by something which doesn't work in 10.1. Nice. What was wrong with susewatcher+YOU that meant it needed replacing? If it ain't broke, .....
On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 15:58 +0100, William Gallafent wrote:
On Thursday 25 May 2006 15:43, suse@rio.vg wrote: [snip]
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.
Having just caught up with this conversation, I realise that 10.0 susewatcher + YOU, which worked fine, has been removed, to be replaced by something which doesn't work in 10.1. Nice. What was wrong with susewatcher+YOU that meant it needed replacing? If it ain't broke, .....
The fact that Zen update is broken is not the issue, the issue is that Zen update was -_not_- tested during beta/RC and there was no contingency to go back to SUSEwatcher in the event that Zen was broken. There is nothing worse than burning your bridges behind you. All they had to do is provide the factory source for update and it would have been known that Zen was not working. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998
On Friday 26 May 2006 00:05, Ken Schneider wrote:
The fact that Zen update is broken is not the issue, the issue is that Zen update was -_not_- tested during beta/RC and there was no contingency to go back to SUSEwatcher in the event that Zen was broken. There is nothing worse than burning your bridges behind you. All they had to do is provide the factory source for update and it would have been known that Zen was not working.
I think you're missing how the new updater works. Factory could have been used to test the updater. The new updater is not relying on a special YOU style repository, it will look at all your installation sources. So you could have tested it
On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 02:40 +0200, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Friday 26 May 2006 00:05, Ken Schneider wrote:
The fact that Zen update is broken is not the issue, the issue is that Zen update was -_not_- tested during beta/RC and there was no contingency to go back to SUSEwatcher in the event that Zen was broken. There is nothing worse than burning your bridges behind you. All they had to do is provide the factory source for update and it would have been known that Zen was not working.
I think you're missing how the new updater works. Factory could have been used to test the updater. The new updater is not relying on a special YOU style repository, it will look at all your installation sources. So you could have tested it
No... I do understand how it works, by combining YOU and other sources into one place and using one daemon to check for updates. But this was -not- checked for functionality before the release of 10.1 and now there are many problems with people using Zen. The biggest being wake up times and resources being utilized by Zen. People new to SUSE are going to spread a -lot- of _BAD_ publicity about 10.1. It is all about perception. Once the bugs are worked out it will be a great program but the bugs should have been worked out before forcing it as the only update program available. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998
suse@rio.vg wrote:
Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
YaST, YUM, RUG, APT, SYNAPTIC, SMART, etc.
Is there a good description of what each tool does that makes it unique from the others?
[good summary deleted] One change, though:
YAST == Updates through the SuSE system, but only interactively, no cron jobs.
YOU (Yast Online Update) updates per cron job, only for SUSE packages and not for 3rd party repositories. It may be turned on in the yast2 interface. Via that interface it is only sensible to just install everything as it comes. A download-only option exists, but is not appropriate in any realistic scenario. If one wants to download new updates, get a notification and install the update later after a manual check, one places an appropriate YOU-server in /etc/youservers and uses the following cron job: 21 4 * * * root online_update -s -d | grep INSTALL (probably with a different time :-). This sends email notification when an update is available. The actual installation is done by online_update -i -V If you have several systems, up to a few dozen, place the download area on an NFS filesystem and use clusterssh to install the packages on all systems at once. (If you have more systems and are still interested in this explanation, your release process seriously needs improvement. ;-) That said, apt-get is surely much more flexible than YOU. (I'm missing something like apticron from Debian, though.)
At this point, I recommend using APT for servers and just using YAST for updating desktops.
Nah, APT is good for everything. ;-) Seriously, IMHO apt is better for desktops and YOU is better for some servers: SUSE provides a good selection of server software and YOU can update that, as part of a proper release process for smaller deployments without fully-automatic installation (see above). Whereas on a desktop, one almost always has several rpm repositories: packman, usr-local, and such. YOU doesn't help a bit here; here one *needs* apt. Cheers, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany
Joachim Schrod wrote:
suse@rio.vg wrote:
Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
YaST, YUM, RUG, APT, SYNAPTIC, SMART, etc.
Is there a good description of what each tool does that makes it unique from the others?
[good summary deleted]
One change, though:
YAST == Updates through the SuSE system, but only interactively, no cron jobs.
YOU (Yast Online Update) updates per cron job, only for SUSE packages and not for 3rd party repositories. It may be turned on in the yast2 interface. Via that interface it is only sensible to just install everything as it comes. A download-only option exists, but is not appropriate in any realistic scenario.
If one wants to download new updates, get a notification and install the update later after a manual check, one places an appropriate YOU-server in /etc/youservers and uses the following cron job:
21 4 * * * root online_update -s -d | grep INSTALL
(probably with a different time :-). This sends email notification when an update is available. The actual installation is done by
online_update -i -V
/usr/bin/online_update is not part of SuSE 10.1. As far as I can tell, there is no longer any command-line component of YOU. I think they decided to roll it all up into rug. :)
At this point, I recommend using APT for servers and just using YAST for updating desktops.
Nah, APT is good for everything. ;-) Seriously, IMHO apt is better for desktops and YOU is better for some servers: SUSE provides a good selection of server software and YOU can update that, as part of a proper release process for smaller deployments without fully-automatic installation (see above). Whereas on a desktop, one almost always has several rpm repositories: packman, usr-local, and such. YOU doesn't help a bit here; here one *needs* apt.
Well, when I think of desktop users, I'm thinking of people who aren't entirely comfortable with the command-line, nor using non-standard apps. Once they're comfortable with more customization, they don't need me to tell them which to use. :) Personally, I'm using apt in a cron even on my notebook at this point.
participants (9)
-
Anders Johansson -
Basil Chupin -
Carl Hartung -
Joachim Schrod -
Ken Schneider -
Kevanf1 -
Roger Oberholtzer -
suse＠rio.vg -
William Gallafent