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As far as I can tell the fedora guys wrote libhawkey and dnf to reach some sort of middle ground, as switching to zypper would have implied breaking everything
by baghira 11y ago
As far as I can tell the fedora guys wrote libhawkey and dnf to reach some sort of middle ground, as switching to zypper would have implied breaking everything (i.e. all the scripts admins use, rewriting parts of anaconda, etc). The compatibility is not perfect, and in fact a fair amount of people complained (see some discussion on phoronix). As far as the parent post is concerned, to switch to apt would imply switching to deb, which would be a massive change. RPM is simply too different, both in positive (the possibility of changing target directory and of rolling back) and in negative (dependency specification is still rudimental compared to .deb, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNwNF19oFqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNwNF19oFqM). And as rwmj14 said, libsolv is better.
- amyjess 11y agoFor the record, apt doesn't always imply deb: apt-rpm exists, and it's used by a few distros, including PCLinuxOS.
- vidarh 11y agoapt-rpm has been around for more than a decade, and was considered for Fedora back in the day (it lost out due to a combination of lack of multilib support back then, and considerations over complexity). Last time I used Fedora it was available in the repository and worked just fine - I always preferred it over yum, despite also preferring RPM over Deb.
- baghira 11y agoI thought apt-rpm was basically dead, happy to read that it is still around. And yes, I reckon the second part of my comment was wrong, you can have apt on top of .deb .
- vidarh 11y agoWell, you may be right it's basically dead - checking out the repository there appears to have only been one commit or so in the last two years. It may still work, but it's certainly not getting more features. It's a shame, though - apt-rpm worked very well.