On Saturday 27 May 2006 18:25, Richard Bos wrote:
Op zaterdag 27 mei 2006 19:10, schreef houghi:
Naturaly he was talking to/about you. Who else would make a case for apt
What case? People that know apt use it happily. People that don't know apt are advised by suse (and it's community) to use smart for the moment. When zypp/rug or working normally people will use that. That's fine with me (case closed). I think that apt should just be part of the suse distribution, like it is in 10.1 (not on CD, but on the ftp server). This is the best case. Case closed ;)
I'm not convinced that that's just the case. I'd quite happily say that I'm a pretty experienced APT user, but these days I only use smart; there's more to the smart/apt distinction. Some have already raised the quick pros/cons of the different package management systems, but perhaps a few more words could be said. Apt on suse is not nearly as pacey as it is on debian/ubuntu. I have no idea as to the root of the actual problem of this issue -- whether it's extra configurations that optimise perfomance on debian/ubuntu, or an issue with apt-rpm itself -- but it's certainly an issue, and it is kind of obvious. Needless to say, this issue does not bother me at all, and certainly wouldn't stop me using it on suse. Apt is not BiArch, and it's for this particular reason that Shuttleworth has mentioned its possible inclusion in Ubuntu 6.10 (as it's set to be). This is definitely an issue for me, an AMD64 user, on SUSE. Smart has a lot more nice things that apt simply lacks. It can use Yast repositories, it can use Yum repositories, and very nicely for me -- it can make multiple connections at once and can appropriately handle mirror-sources/repositories. This is something that Apt can't really do. This is hugely useful as download speeds are dramatically increased. Though, I also like smart's --shell interface. Don't get me wrong, APT has a few advantages too, I've used apt quite a bit and have come to know and got too used to its strengths. For me the only thing I really miss now though is build-dep, which is incredibly useful for those who venture into compiling. Smart has nothing like this, and really I doubt there are current plans to introduce this. As to using APT on suse, I see people every other day saying "don't use apt, it'll muck up your system". I used it quite a bit, and I only ever recall having to do rpm --rebuilddb once while using apt, and to be frank I'm not convinced that apt was to blame for the error. So I'm not really put off using it. I think smart can still improve (and indeed it looks incredibly promising), and apt isn't a bad tool at all -- I could still use it all the time if I *had* to, but as SUSE is now, I'd really rather use smart and recommend others to, too. Regards, Francis Giannaros.