[Techtalk] Apt on RedHat

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 04:44:09PM +0100 or thereabouts, Dan wrote:
> I've gotten used to running Apt on Debian: no more installation
> nightmares.
> 
> I haven't used Red Hat for several years, and my question is: is how
> does Apt on Red Hat compare to Apt on Debian? In particular, can you
> download+install packages on Red Hat as easily on Debian? Does either
> system maintain particularly more recent libraries? (Sometimes you have
> to settle for the previous version when you use Apt because the current
> version hasn't been packaged.)

First, do you mean Red Hat or Fedora? In the time you have not
been using it, the distro has split into the very conservative
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which comes with older programs and 
technical support and a price tag; and Fedora Linux, which is 
much newer, much more inclined to have latest and greatest, 
and supported by whoever on the internet knows the answer. You
can't buy Fedora as a shrink-wrapped box. You download the CDs
(or I presume the usual companies will burn them and sell them). 

I know absolutely nothing about the former except that a rather
obscure bug I had on Red Hat 7.x is still appearing: periodically
I get updates to my bugzilla entry where it is spotted on RHEL 3
or 4.

And Fedora? apt-for-rpm (rpm4apt?) does exist under some spelling
or other, but I install yum instead. I don't know how closely the 
syntax of yum commands mirrors apt usage, but yum does all the 
dependency-checking for you, if that's what you are looking for. 

I have heard that the apt for rpm program uses the --force option 
to rpm. I don't know whether this is true. If it is, this is bad.
As far as I know, yum doesn't. 

You do things like "yum search blah" or "yum install foo". 
Generally with sudo at the start :) And it thinks for a while,
and goes off to ask repositories of information on the net, and
then tells you stuff or installs things (with dependencies). You 
can add extra repositories for both apt and yum. People living 
outside the US often add the repositories which include Fedora 
packages re-rolled to include mp3 support, for example.

Telsa