[PlanetCCRMA] apt repository for fedora core 5?

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 13:41 -0700, Mike Jewell wrote:
> I noticed the same things and had the same questions.  Maybe Fernando
> could give a little history on this;  Why the switch from apt, etc.

Ok... comments below. 

> Mike
>
> On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 00:44 +0000, Marco Schroeder wrote:
> > Hello everyone!
> >  
> >  First of all I want to thank your for planetccrma at home. I am not new 
> > to planetccrma at home but new at this mailing-list. (In fact this is my 
> > first mailing list subscribed ever.)
> >  
> >  I already used the repositories with fedora core 3 and core 4. I now 
> > changed my system to core 5. It seems that you dropped apt-support for 
> > core 5, as far as I understood from the website. Everything is done now 
> > with yum. Did I get that right? 

Yes, you did. 

> > It's just that I so totally was getting 
> > used to apt and synaptic (great tool) that I would be happy to see 
> > apt-repos for core 5. Okay, yum is the genuine packet-manager of fedora, 
> > so I would of course change to it ... if there is no apt-repo.

So.... a long time ago when I started Planet CCRMA there was no apt or
yum. It was the time of "rpm hell" (ie: you want to installing something
but that needs something else you don't have and when you get it you go
back to the beginning of this phrase :-) 

At the beginning of 2002 I started using apt for rpm as a solution for
package management. That was a port to rpm that Conectiva wrote of the
original Debian apt (Conectiva was a distro from Brazil - much later
bought by Mandrake, thus "Mandriva"). Yum was developed by Yellow Dog, a
redhat based distro retargeted to the ppc platform. I think because it
was much closer to rpm itself than apt, it slowly became the choice for
redhat and later fedora [for a while there were a bunch of metadata
formats being used in fedora, yum, the one for up2date and the internal
metadata on the install disks]. 

I did not want to switch to yum mainly because there was no "Synaptic"
equivalent for yum (although I don't use it myself), and also because a
switch from anything to anything else is (in my experience) always a lot
of work. 

But by the time I started working on packages for fc5 there was no apt
available that I found that would work (plus until very recently apt did
not support multilibs, ie: not useful in the x86_64 architecture). So I
decided to take the plunge and switch. 

But now there _is_ an apt that works. I'm not up to date on what it does
but I did read a while back that there was an experimental version that
would start using the same metadata that yum uses (that is, you don't
need a different "repository"). And it would also support x86_64. I
presume that is the one that is now in Extras. 

I have not tried the new apt. If it uses the same metadata as yum (what
does the default configuration point to in terms of repositories?) then
it would be just a matter of creating a proper configuration file for it
to use the current yum metadata. 

BTW, in the yum world there's yumex, not quite the same as Synaptic (at
least last time I tried it) but a decent gui. 

> >  By the way on the website I noticed, that you give some apt-get 
> > commands below the headline "installing-applications" so that's in fact 
> > what was confusing me on this whole apt an yum thing. 

Yes, sorry about that, same old lame excuse of not having time to do
everything...

> > Either ways is okay. 
> > I will use planetccrma at home in the future for sure - it's simply great.

Thanks. 
I'll see when I can get a minute to try out apt again. 

-- Fernando