[nzlug] CentOS and the "joys" of rpm based systems

[Daniel Lawson]

> works, but I really wouldn't bother. A package manager is a package manager after all, and I've had just as many issues with apt as with yum ( well, except for that python overflow thing, but that was a long time ago ) over the years. I think you'll find CentOS 5.1 has been available since before christmas if that's of any use to you.
>   

I've always found yum's package resolution tediously slow. There is also 
some benefit to having the same abstraction layer around package 
management on all your machines, and there are annoying differences in 
commands. While the "install" method of both is the same, searching for 
packages is different:

apt-cache search on debian based systems (note: i can't recall if this 
is exported via apt-rpm at all!) provides similar output to yum list

yum search provides rather different output, and is typically useless.

While it's not "hard" to learn two different toolsets, when you are 
dealing with somewhere between one and two hundred debian machines and 
you have 5 redhat/centos machines to look after, the overhead of 
tracking, learning, and *passing on to others* the extra commandsets 
gets pretty high very quickly.