[ale] SUSE package manager and install empathy

[James Sumners]

Five of the servers I administer at Clayton State are running RHEL4.
Let's switch to talking about just the basic tools surrounding the
package types and look at a simple example. For this example let's try
to get some basic information about a package without having to do a
bunch of research into the tools. That is we want to "query" a
package.

As you can see from the example below, rpm returns just about no
useful information and apt actually tells you something. I have no
idea what information is available in the RPM package that rpm could
return. It seems to me that you have to _know how to build_ an RPM
before you can get rpm to tell you anything useful. On the other had,
apt just prints out its control file[1]. You, the user, don't _need_
to know what a control file is, but you get the benefit of it being a
requirement of the package format.

So there's a concrete example, that is current as of this morning, as
to why I prefer one format to the other.

(N.B. Am I the only that is missing emails from this thread? I have
not received the email from Chuck that Geoffrey replied to and I am
now replying to.)


[1] -- http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/#AEN92

==== Example ====
RHEL4:
$ rpm -q screen
screen-4.0.2-5

Debian 6.0:
$ apt-cache show screen
Package: screen
Priority: optional
Section: misc
Installed-Size: 984
Maintainer: Jan Christoph Nordholz <hesso at pool.math.tu-berlin.de>
Architecture: i386
Version: 4.0.3-14
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1), libncursesw5 (>= 5.6+20071006-3), libpam0g
(>= 0.99.7.1), dpkg (>= 1.15.4) | install-info
Filename: pool/main/s/screen/screen_4.0.3-14_i386.deb
Size: 604930
MD5sum: 4f2fe23c048e10f7592ab4be48fc9f12
SHA1: b77be652725e1e93f22b2918c1b04ec517427b20
SHA256: 6fbfe0e399c521fb433fdb4e8357927527c5dd392e3841f1441ea3ea6f0c7802
Description: terminal multiplexor with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation
 screen is a terminal multiplexor that runs several separate "screens" on a
 single physical character-based terminal.  Each virtual terminal emulates a
 DEC VT100 plus several ANSI X3.64 and ISO 2022 functions.  Screen sessions
 can be detached and resumed later on a different terminal.
 .
 Screen also supports a whole slew of other features.  Some of these are:
 configurable input and output translation, serial port support, configurable
 logging, multi-user support, and utf8 charset support.
Homepage: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/screen
Tag: hardware::input:keyboard, implemented-in::c,
interface::text-mode, role::program, scope::utility,
uitoolkit::ncurses, works-with::software:running

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 7:07 AM, Geoffrey Myers
<lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote:
> Chuck Payne wrote:
>> Seriously Red Hat 6.0. Dude, that was 10 years ago, if RPM suck,
>> Enterprise Companies would use it. Yum has make it some much better,
>> try Fedora. In fact my only issue with them is they are starting to
>> dumd down the distro to be more popular for others. Both with openSUSE
>> and Fedora you can do upgrade to the next version. It works out
>> everything for you. Just like Ubuntu.
>
> I thought he was referring to the much newer release of Red Hat that
> just came out.  Cartman came out in 1999, certainly not germane to the
> current discussion?  Emphasis on 'current'.



-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59