zypper, rug, smart, YAST, apt or other?

[rsmccain]

I apologize if this has been asked. It seems like a question that would come up often but I didn't see any mention of it after searching on "zypper" and going through a few pages of results.

Anyways, what method do you use and why? It seems every year or so a new method pops up to keep my software up to date.

Is one becoming more of a standard? Is one falling off the radar?

FWIW, I've gotten used to zypper lately.

Thanks.

[caf4926]

This might be posted in the wrong the section, it's more of chit-chat.

But Yast has been the control center in suse for a long time. I know it's not directly the updater. But the majority use the Gui it provides in the likes of Software Management.

I use Yast and Software Management. I have the suse updater disabled.

zipper from the CLI is great too.

I have Smart installed always, just in case.

[rsmccain]

Based on that answer it doesn't seem like any which one really stands out.

On my SLE boxes I use YAST, but for my dev boxes I've been using smart and more recently zypper.

Sorry if I posted in the wrong forum.

Thx..

[caf4926]

Everyone was raving on about zypper when OS11 was first released. And it is certainly lightening fast compared to earlier disasters. I would have to give it full marks really

[greenmachine]

zypper!

when I spell it correctly....

As I am learning zypper more and more, my speed with setting up and altering/enabling/disabling/etc. the repositories is getting much quicker than through the YaST modules.

Also, zypper uses a very good solver - much better than apt or rug or smart on a SUSE system. (Note: I said, on a SUSE system.) YaST is just a front-end to the same libzypp back-end.

I have been very impressed.

And this is probably better in Chit-Chat.

g

[gropiuskalle]

I have been an avid fan of smart for a long time (used GUI and CLI), since package-management via YaST made me fall asleep even before I could enter any search queries. But there hardly can be a doubt that with 11.0 zypper is the way to go. I use 11.0 for about a month or two now, I still am surprised how fast zypper got, it really fills me with joy every time I use it. I also like the syntax - easy to remember, logical, yet flexible (← important when using about 40 repositories like I do).

When things get complicated, I use YaST, GUIs sometimes point out things a bit better to me, also I really like the filter-options of YaST.

[RedDwarf]

Guys, ZYpp is based on this: http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.pdf

From the abstract:

Using off-the-shelf SAT solvers, pseudo-boolean solvers, and Integer Linear Programming solvers, we have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: (1) Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and (2) Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller packages should be preferred over larger ones.
We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian’s apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable, and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provides concrete benefits to end users.

I'm sorry for the others... but ZYpp is perfect. While

These numbers show that apt-get fails to find a solution when one exists in about 0.61% of install attempts.

Then you have:
- Support for metalinks (Duncan Mac-Vicar P. » Blog Archive » libZYpp, torrents and metalinks)
- "Services" (Duncan Mac-Vicar P. » Blog Archive » Introducing ZYpp services)
- Packages can depend of hardware, so when you install a new hardware the needed packages (drivers) to use it are installed automatically: Duncan Mac-Vicar P. » Blog Archive » Extremely easy driver installation
- Support for delta RPMs.
- Very efficient (Duncan Mac-Vicar P. » Blog Archive » yum and ZYpp speed / memory usage)

Why someone would want to use something different?

[Magic31]

+1 for zypper. Certainly if we are talking openSUSE.

It's fast, it's lighter for the system (less memory/cpu consumption) and has loads of options and switches.

As I see it it will become the standard for openSUSE/SLES for at least the next five years (though it's a gut feeling - no official base to state this on)

Cheers,
Wj