On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 22:53 -0400, Shibu Basheer wrote:

Hi, I am new to APT or SMART. What are their advantages over RPM? Do they integrate with yast? Also, which should I be using apt, or smart? How does apt know how to upgrade already installed rpm packages? Sorry for all the questions, but please someone help me choose the best package manager.

Thanks, SB.

APT and SMART are just frontends to RPM as is YaST. Until you become more experienced with SUSE I would recommend sticking to YaST as the other package managers do support the loading of "bleeding edge" updates/software that can make your system unstable. YMMV. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

On 12/19/05, Shibu Basheer wrote:

Hi, I am new to APT or SMART. What are their advantages over RPM? Do they integrate with yast? Also, which should I be using apt, or smart? How does apt know how to upgrade already installed rpm packages? Sorry for all the questions, but please someone help me choose the best package manager.

Thanks, SB.

The packaging/installation system for SuSE is rpm, like in RedHat and other distro's. YaST, apt for rpm, and Smart are only frontends for rpm. Their benefit is that they organize repositories of rpms, and can help you solve dependency problems. With commandline rpm, everything is up to you - to find the rpms, to download them, to see what depends on what, and to install them in the right order. YaST (usually) is configured for the standard repository for SuSE, i.e. with it you have access to all packages, which are part of the original system. You can use it to install third party packages, as well to use third party repositories, which may have extended set of packages, or newer versions of the software. Apt-Get - Originally apt is the Debian's package manager, which works with .deb packages. Conectiva have changed/recreated it, so now it can work with rpm packages. For now (as far as I'm aware) there is only one full repository for SuSE. You can limit apt to use only part of that repository - i.e. only the base, security and update components. In that case, there will be no difference between apt ans YaST - you are going to have access and deal only with base system packages and their updates. In that same repository there are a lot of additional sections (components) which give you access to "bleeding edge" versions of different software, as well as to some established as quality packages, which for legal reasons can not be part of the official distro. Most of the later has their own YaST repositories as well. In short - YaST and apt differ in the way the rpms are stored in the repository, and the description files the repositories have to describe what packages are there, and which depends on which, etc. Some packages you can find only i apt repositories. SMART - still new manager, not well tested, and still a lot of wishes :). The main advantage of it is, that it does not represent a new type of repository, but can use all of the existing ones - YaST, apt, red carpet (this is broken in the current version, but maybe they'll fix it). Red-carpet - it was ximian's (now novell's) way for managing packages. It is more powerful, as it can be used for remote deployment on many workstations, etc. Not really used as a general purpose repository. The only real use I found so far is to keep up to date my mono packages, as mono project actually create only this repo. And noone take care to create apt or yast repo for the new versions. So, as conclusion: I personally use Apt for my dev/test machine, where I want to have everything as new as possible, and YaST on the servers, where I need stability. I tried to use SMART only because it promised to use red carpet repo's, I can use only one manager for all my needs (apt and redcarpet). As for now it fails with red carpet repos, I'm back on apt. Please, note that there can be any terminology mistakes in above post, but it mostly covers the basic ideas. Cheers -- -- Svetoslav Milenov (Sunny)