Now, I've been using Fedora Core 4 for a while now. I decided it would be interesting to try out Fedora 5 for the new development machine
kindly donated by Brad Hards.
Other than updated software, it seems the same as Fedora Core 4 but with an extra "feature":
For the first time in Fedora, we have a tightly integrated package-management system, Pirut.
-- Inside Fedora Core 5, Red Hat Magazine
Only, it cannot install packages from CD by default! It reminds me of that Michelle Branch song:
Goodbye to user friendliness.
Goodbye to the sanity that I knew.
You were the one thing I tried to install.
[ok, that was terrible, I admit :)]
This is a shocking regression and I'm stunned that this made it past quality control, into the release.
Luckily, it's not that bleak as there are solutions:
The first is to create a repository on your hard disk containing all 5 CDs' RPMs. Of course, this takes a lot of disk space... When following those instructions, if you have the CDs, copy the RPMS and the comps.xml directly - don't bother creating an ISO and dealing with the loopback filesystem business (
-o loop). The confusing line for me was:
rpm -Uvh RPMS/createrepo*
That was just a tricky way of saying make sure you install the version of "createrepo" RPM stored on the CDs.
The second method I haven't tried but only found a few minutes ago. You can apparently just point yum to the CD ROM drive. This appears to work just like Fedora 4 - requires no extra disk space as it reads straight from the CDs. I'm wondering: if I'm searching for packages, will it search the current CD in the drive or all of them?
3 comments:
I haven't used fedora nor redhat since a long time (since I discovered I had to manage all dependencies myself when installing anything...)
So, finally, they added a package manager ? There was none before that ?
Could this be the first linux virus - a devious little beast that refuses to be pinned down and is known variously as zen/zmd/zypp/pirut but always manifests the same symptoms of an unusable package manager and extreme user frustration? Quick! Get me a 10cc of Yum or Smart, the only known antidotes
;-)
anonymous: Yes, "yum" does dependency resolving. I don't think there were any before that (except various attempts at e.g. porting "apt-get" from Debian to Red Hat). Mandrake/Mandriva's equivalent to "yum" is "urpmi" .
My experience with all Linux package management systems and their GUIs is that they:
1. are slow
2. require too much configuration
3. assume infinitely fast and unlimited connections (for updates, use deltarpm or something _please_!)
4. are buggy
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