Comment by JoelMcCracken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoelMcCracken | Hacker News Reader

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I was thinking "Hasn't it always been?", and then remembered Redhat.

Debian shows that actually solving real problems well is a valid way to approach open source software over the long term.

I first got into Linux years ago, before Ubuntu really existed. At the time, Debian was really awesome. It solved the biggest problem at the time: installing, updating, and removing software on *nix systems.

By contrast, Redhat had rpms, but they sucked. I still, to this day, have a difficult time figuring out how to do /anything/ with packages on anything derived from redhat. What is up2date? what is yum? where does the rpm command it? why aren't all of these documented well?

I think ultimately the rise of Debian illustrates the conflict of interests that comes from certifications. Making your software easier to use makes certifications less valuable, after all.

I haven't used RedHat-based distros for years now but I remember that back when I switched to Debian-based distros I was equally confused about Debian's package management system. I didn't think, and still don't think, that dpkg and apt are documented that well. To answer your question: yum is to rpm as apt is to dpkg. But I've always found it weird that there's a difference between apt-get and apt-cache; in contrast, "yum install" and "yum search" use the same executable. The documentation concerning building Debian packages is often out of date and scattered all over the Internet with no clear central place. And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt.

>And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt.

Aptitude is a APT frontend that solves exactly the problem you mentioned; no more `apt-cache search` nor `apt-file`, it's all just `aptitude`. Plus a little bit of dependencies tracking (which I think apt has it available for a while already). aptitude is exactly what apt should be, IMHO.

Basically my experience with Debian long ago as well. I have always thought the Debian packaging system was far superior to rpm and was glad to see Ubuntu take the Debian experience and bring it to the masses (although I still prefer straight up Debian for myself)

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