Linux software management tools

[John Guster]

Why do we need yum, up2date, rpm...in Linux? Why can't one just use one command to do one thing, like swinstall to install software in HP-UX?

[smatador]

Hi,
Very interesting question, and perhaps the best one for all linux is apt.
Apt can be use in debian/suse/redhat...
Maybe one day, there will be just one for all now we have many tools write in different language to manage just one repository.
With linux we have the choice...

[Ralph Grothe]

This is another unification attempt:

http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html

[Court Campbell]

I will assume you are referring to Red Hat distros. You really don't need both yum and up2date. Red Hat moved from up2date to using yum in RHEL5. I believe the move was based on the fact that yum was more versatile and the fact that fedora uses yum. It may just be easier to have one update manager than maintaining two. As for rpm, well that has been around for quite a while. Yum just uses rpm in the background to do the installs. I would say that rpm is an equivalent to swinstall. And that yum is a much more powerful equivalent to HP-UX's software assistant.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Note for HP-UX there are a lot of third party software installs that do not use SD-UX.

SD-UX is a good tool.

Some notes on Linux:

yum, this actually uses rpm commands. It is a front end to rpm.

up2date also acts as a front end to rpm.

So rpm is the central tool for Red Hat software management. yum takes care of very complicated rpm commands and handles the downloads on top of that.

upd2date is less advanced, but also handles the downloads.

SEP