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I don't have the knowledge to support or contest anything except your last sentence. yum's UI is the only thing I like more than apt-get. But yum doesn't have the concept of depends vs. recommends, so installing nginx, for example, REQUIRES pulling down geo-IP libraries that are entirely unnecessary.

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RPM 4.12.0 brought in support for weak dependencies, which implements the tags Recommends, Suggests, Supplements and Enhances, which provides analog functionality from apt > http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.12.0

This is in Fedora 21, so should be in RHEL 8.

Newest version of RPM 4.13 will implemented logical dependencies, e.g. Require: foo IF bar , Require: foo OR bar OR baz, which are far more usable than soft dependencies.

Entirely agree with you. That is the singular area that dpkg used to beat rpm as a format. That isn't a feature of apt-get or yum, but of the underlying package format.

However, it is supported in a very new release of rpm:

http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.12.0#Generalbugfixesanden...

""" New --recommends, --suggests, --supplements and --enhances query aliases for querying weak dependencies """

So it is coming along :)

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