Atomicorp

Sounds like an awful lot more work than "yum update" to me

scott wrote:Sounds like an awful lot more work than "yum update" to me

but the two do completely different things. one upgrades the system and the other breaks your server

be honest, how many problems have people had after "yum'ming" their systems to latest versions? and by that i mean "this rpm requires this version of otherrpm" freebsd comes as a complete package where every port works with every other port.

Theres a lot more polish in the rpm or debian package systems than youve got access to in ports. Ports (and its cousin, emerge) are very one dimensional when it comes to packaging, all of your integration occurs in the make file and whatever macros the developer tries to create along with it. Certainly its flexible, but it lacks the "awareness" of other packages on the system. Let me give you an example, in the ASL gradm package, I've got the install procedure for the basic components of the package, chpax, gradm, etc, actions that happen before the package installs, after it installs, and actions that would happen on an upgrade event. Thats the boring stuff.. then I have actions associated with actions, like say you install a java rpm, this will trigger an 1 kind of event to complete the integration with an ASL kernel, theres another event for java upgrades, and yet another for removing the package.

The other advantage with the yum/smart/apt approach is that you can have guys like me create archives.

scott wrote:Theres a lot more polish in the rpm or debian package systems than youve got access to in ports. Ports (and its cousin, emerge) are very one dimensional when it comes to packaging, all of your integration occurs in the make file and whatever macros the developer tries to create along with it. Certainly its flexible, but it lacks the "awareness" of other packages on the system. Let me give you an example, in the ASL gradm package, I've got the install procedure for the basic components of the package, chpax, gradm, etc, actions that happen before the package installs, after it installs, and actions that would happen on an upgrade event. Thats the boring stuff.. then I have actions associated with actions, like say you install a java rpm, this will trigger an 1 kind of event to complete the integration with an ASL kernel, theres another event for java upgrades, and yet another for removing the package.

The other advantage with the yum/smart/apt approach is that you can have guys like me create archives.

You certainly know more about this stuff than I ever hope to, but from the limited experience that I have as an end user, I've had a lot less trouble and much more predictable results with FreeBSD. For instance, on a centos3 system that's running project gamera, I have the mail system complaining about running a wrong version of a perl extension, xx.31 instead of xx.34. As I understand ports, it would make sure everything is synched.

Anywhoo, you're the expert, i could be wrong.

I've you're using compatible repositories there should be no dependancy problems with yum. I don't recall ever having any on my servers. Just don't go installing every random rpm you find on the net.

You get the same issues with the ports system (and CPAN I might add), the only difference is that it doesn't tell you about it.