Why do techs recommend YUM installs yet repositories and providers are ages behind?

Question

I have been reading page after page after page about the benefits of using YUM package installer and how NOBODY should built installs from source files (which again makes no sense to me) yet the repositories and source builders always package files in Tarball format, leaving a TON of work (which usually ends up going wrong) to the individual instead of formatting SRPMs for the end user.

Has the world gone mad? I feel like I am taking crazy pills!

Answer 1

Among other things, tarballs are system independent and YUM appears to be RPM-based and thus mostly usable by Linux only (plus Netware and AIX, so as I said, Linux only :) )

Answer 2

Well, first of all there's more to life than just RPM and YUM. An SRPM would be (somewhat) useless to Debian, for instance.

As for why you'd use a package repository over building everything yourself, well I don't know about you, but I've much rather just run (I'm using Ubuntu so I have apt-get instead of yum):

# apt-get install firefox

Than trying to figure out all the dependencies, as well as all the dependencies dependencies, make sure I have the correct versions of everything, download/build/install any that I don't have (or are out of date: if updating existing dependencies, make sure the newer versions don't break any existing software that I have and make sure I don't end up with 15 different versions of the same thing), and only after all that then download/configure/build/install firefox.

Then realise I'll also want Open Office or MySQL and start all over again!

That said, there are some packages that I install the latest version of from source. For example, I run my media centre off MythTV and I always like to build the latest version of that from Subversion. But even then, with a package manager, that's as easy as:

# apt-get build-dep mythtv
> cd ~/src/mythtv/
> svn co <svn repo of mythtv>
> configure && (etc)

That is, the package management software already knows all the dependencies for MythTV and it can download and install them automatically. Why spend hours tracking it all down manually?

In the end, it sounds to me like maybe you'd prefer a distro like Gentoo... that's the benefit of Linux, of course. If you don't like how things are run in the Fedora/RedHat distribution, you can just choose a different one.

Answer 3

There are a few reasons to use a packaging infrastructure (like yum):

1. Creating "installations" is much easier to do, due to automatic dependency installation. From the simple

   yum install blah

   to creating chroots with mock/--installroot, or live CDs, etc.

2. Managing those installations. From the obvious

   yum update

   to operations which are much harder to do otherwise like:

   yum --security update

   ,

   yum --bz=1234 update-minimal

   ,

   yum --disablerepo=testing distro-sync

   .

3. Auditing those installations. The obvious examples here being

   yum history

   (not available in plain RHEL-5 atm.) and

   yum verify

   .

...however speed is not a factor, for instance Fedora rawhide moves as fast as gentoo.

RHEL-5 does not move that quickly, because it's 3 years old and is not supposed to break ... not because it's managed using yum/rpms. There are third party providers, like iuscommunity, which release co-installable newer releases for various packages. Or if you need to you create your own.

Or you can run a production server on Fedora rawhide or gentoo, both will have the latest packages really quickly ... I would not recommend that option though.