Re: [SLE] Update-o-matic

Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
YaST, YUM, RUG, APT, SYNAPTIC, SMART, etc.

What's wrong with this picture?

OK. Perhaps I'm getting old. And do not get me wrong. I like choice. But
are so many different tools really needed?

Is there a good description of what each tool does that makes it unique
from the others?

I think I would find a feature matrix most welcome. Which does and does
not do what? Which platform does it run on? What resources will it use
and not use? That sort of thing.

Something for the opensuse site?



YAST == Updates through the SuSE system, but only interactively, no cron
jobs.

YUM == The updater used by RedHat, which now works since SuSE switched
over to RedHat's repository style. Has both a gui and marginal
command-line support.

RUG == The command-line part of SuSE's ZenWorks Management Daemon. Many
of us have come to the conclusion that ZenWorks is a thoroughly broken
product to be avoided at all costs and was only included in SuSE 10.1 in
a misguided attempt to increase Novell's sales of the expensive full
ZenWorks Suite. It doesn't bother to check dependencies when removing
packages, which could potentially completely trash your system. It also
maxes out your CPU for three to four minutes just to check for updates,
which zen-updater does every time you login, regardless of whether or
not you've told it to only run once per day. Zen-updater also currently
crashes when attempting to update through delta-rpms, and possibly others.

APT == Command-line updater/manager from Debian. 10.1 is the first
release of SuSE with official packages for it. It works great both in
cron and on-demand, but no GUI.

SYNAPTIC == GUI interface for APT, no packages for SuSE at the moment.

SMART == Uses the same system as apt, and includes a GUI, but doesn't
have quite the feature list that apt does.

FOU4S == Fast Online Update for SuSE. An independently developed system
to give a full set of features for YaST updating from the command-line.
When SuSE switched to the RedHat style repositories for 10.1, it was
broken. The author is current writing a thesis, but hopefully an update
for this will eventually be forthcoming, as many many servers on the
internet depend on it. From the server/command-line perspective, fou4s
cannot be beat.


There are several reasons for so many different updaters. Many years
ago, there were no updaters. Each distribution created its' own.
RedHat created RedCarpet, SuSE built on their installer suite YaST, and
Debian created apt. YUM came in a bit later from one of distributions
built off RedHat, since RedCarpet wasn't GPL'd (if I remember
correctly). APT, initially, only worked with Debians' .deb files,
rather than the RPMs used by RedHat and SuSE.

Currently, SuSE and RedHat seem to be headed toward a convergence, at
least server-side, but it's been somewhat derailed by trying to wedge
ZenWorks (Novell's management system going back to Netware, iirc) into SuSE.

Honestly, the choice wasn't that big an issue until SuSE 10.1 was
released with a broken/crippled ZenWorks. Normally, unless you had a
compelling reason, you went with whatever system your distribution
recommended and didn't think twice about it. In those cases, it was
less a bewildering array of choices and more like "I want my updater to
do X, which the default doesn't", so it wasn't hard to find the one that
did what you wanted instead.

On the other hand, the situation we have now is "The default is broken,
pick something else", which leaves people rather in the dark. At this
point, I recommend using APT for servers and just using YAST for
updating desktops. Currently, that leaves people with no program to
warn them of new updates on their desktops, but SuSE claims it's fixing
ZenWorks, so maybe that'll be OK for desktops, once it's released.


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