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

[Steve Holdoway]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:34:30 +1300
Daniel Lawson <daniel at meta.net.nz> wrote:

> 
> > 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.
> 
>  
> 
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TBH, I wouldn't be using either in that environment, but doing all my package selection manually. Well, I actually go further than that and build from source for my production servers... of which only one is redhat.

In a production environment, I don't trust anyone but myself to decide what software to load on my servers - especially not third party packagers who tend to add all possible bells and whistles. 


Steve.

-- 
Steve Holdoway <steve at greengecko.co.nz>