Packaging systems (was: What about post-installfest support?)

Tue May 10 05:21:20 UTC 2005

On May 9, 2005 13:08, Craig Routledge wrote:
> > Walter Dnes wrote:
> > > What's the Suse or Fedora or Debian equivalant of saying
> > > "emerge mplayer"?

The Mandrake/Mandriva equivalent is urpmi mplayer.

> On 05/09/2005 11:24:38 AM, Andrew Hammond wrote:
> > With both SuSE and Fedora, you'd probably install it initially. Debian
> > uses apt, which is similar in functionality to emerge.
>
> Just because I see this getting asked all the time....
>
> rpm is to deb as yum is to apt, so:

rpm is to deb as urpmi is to apt-get

The laptop I am using now started out with Mandrake 10 CE (Community Edition) 
and has been upgraded three times to its current 10.1 OE (Official Edition). 
The next stop is 2005 LE. I have taken other 10.1 OE machines to Mandriva LE 
(Limited Edition) 2005 which is a transitional release to a distro that will 
more fully reflect the influence and contributions of both Mandrake and 
Connnectiva. To upgrade a Mandrake/Mandriva system from one release to 
another:

1. urpmi.removemedia -a  to remove all existing urpmi repositories

2. Go to <http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/> and select the version, architecture, 
and mirrors you want.

3. Copy/paste the urpmi.addmedia statements that the form generates into a 
root shell and execute.

4. urpmi --auto-select and let urpmi figure out how to upgrade from where you 
are currently to where you want to be. urpmi is smart enough to upgrade 
itself first, if necessary, and then restart the upgrade with the latest 
version of urpmi. N.B.: thhis does NOT upgrade kernels. You have to 
explicitly urpmi the kernel and pick which kernel you want to install. It 
will take care of making the changes to the bootloader.

>    yum install package-name
>
> works on Fedora and resolves all dependencies.  There are also graphical
> front-ends, although I haven't used them myself.

urpmi also has a GUI front end, though the command line is much faster. 
Speaking of much faster, I have noticed that urpmi seems to be faster than 
yum, though I have not investigated what the bottleneck is.

> RPM is not an apt equivalent, and it isn't supposed to act at that level.
> So comparing the two just causes confusion and isn't relevant.

Agreed, but it does not stop the ignorant or partisans from trying. I have had 
Debian based systems but saw no advantage over Mandrake but several 
disadvantages, one being that "unstable" is where I needed to be to have the 
versions of software I needed but I am not comfortable running "unstable" for 
production machines as the level of testing, by definition, is not as high as 
it would be for stable, which tends to have geriatric versions of most 
things.

> The big gotcha on Fedora, is that some packages such as mplayer are not
> included for legal reasons.  (Similar to debian non-free)  Packages in
> these grey areas can be found on repositories such as freshrpms, DAG, and
> the like.
>
> > > How many people with Suse or Fedora or Debian have managed to get
> > > mplayer running?

Mandrake has the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) repositories for this. urpmi 
mplayer was all it took to install mplayer.

> Raises hand.  Although on slower machines, I have compiled from source to
> try and optimize mplayer.  My current machine is no speed demon, but is
> fast enough that I just use the binary packages.
>
> Of course, I would not recommend a non-techie new user compile from source
> unless using a system like emerge.  But then, performance for most common
> applications (mail, web browsing, word processing) is constrained by disk
> and other I/O, not CPU.  So compiling for CPU optimization isn't a
> noticable gain in many cases.

With RPM based systems, "compiling from source" is only a matter of building 
the source RPM. Mandriva RPMs are already optimized for i586 anyway so I 
doubt there is much, if any, advantage in building SRPMs for performance 
reasons.

I have found Mandrake/Mandriva's urpmi to be a very sophisticated package 
management system. Creating one's own custom urpmi repository is dead easy. 
We have one at Dinamis in order to automatically install/upgrade software 
that we have packaged (in some cases, written), or non-free software, like 
the Sun JDK, that we have had to build ourselves due to licensing 
restrictions. Jpackage.org provides SRPMs for various RPM based distros for 
Java related packages. Once the binary RPMs have been created, we can put 
them on our own private urpmi repository and simply do:

urpmi sun-jdk

for example, to install the Sun JDK on a Mandrake based system. Provided the 
urpmi repository has been set up properly, the PGP keys used to sign packages 
would be automatically imported when the urpmi.addmedia is done so the PGP 
signatures of packages would be checked upon install or upgrade. Unlike bare 
rpm, urpmi will ask the user, with a default of "N", if the PGP key for a 
given package cannot be found in the RPM PGP key database.

All users of RPM based systems using bare RPM commands have encountered the 
dreaded "I need libfoo.so.4" problem when attempting to install something 
where it may not be obvious which package contains libfoo.so.4. With urpmi:

urpmf libfoo.so.4

will search the headers for the various packages for the configured urpmi 
sources and find all packages that contain that file regardless of whether 
the packages are installed or not. Say it returns: libbar-3.6-1mdk.rpm. I 
would type:

urpmi libbar

That would fetch, verify, prompt for any dependencies, and install the rpm(s). 
I would then urpmi the original package that triggered the dependency.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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