Richard writes:
> OK, now you Linux guys have to explain what's so bad about RPM? From what
> I've seen so far, it seems like a godsend compared to swinstall and even
> patch/ix.

Darned if I know.  I've played with Debian but have mostly spent time with
RedHat which uses (and invented) the RPM package system, and maybe apt-get
is better in some way, but I have a hard time imagining how it could be much
better (maybe Shawn can enlighten us).

The software and patch management under the better Linux distributions can
be really nice if you're used to other operating systems.  RedHat's "Red Hat
Network" for managing your Linux installations is also quite impressive.

I can go to the RHN web site and see all of the packages that I have
installed on my Linux box that have updates available, and I can even click
a button on their web site and my Linux system will update itself!  There's
a daemon you run on RedHat that checks in to the RHN server every hour to
see if there's anything available for it to do, so, if you want to, you can
configure the machine to be self-patching and self-upgrading!

Yesterday I brought my virtual RedHat box up to the latest version of all
packages by just typing "up2date -u" at a root shell prompt.  Half an hour
later it was all done, no reboot required, all new packages active with
subsystems stopped and started automatically as required.  I then did an
"up2date -uf" to "force" the remaining available updates that did not
qualify by default (the latest kernel) and it downloaded and installed the
latest kernel and kernel source code.  I later rebooted and was presented at
boot time with a menu letting me pick whether I wanted to boot the old, the
new, or a debug version of either installed kernel.

Quite a bit different from HP-UX or MPE.

I'm sure it could be hellish if it ever screws up horribly, and the idea of
configuring it to install updates to packages on its own at any time would
probably not be something a sane person would do on a production box, but
it's very impressive when it works (which it always has so far).

It isn't always obvious from RedHat's marketing information, but the Red Hat
Network service is *free* for one system per user.  Beyond that they charge
somewhere between $10 and $20 per month (per system) for the service of
keeping track of what versions of each package you have installed and the
automatic download and install process.  I think this is a worthwhile
service which is well implemented, and this is a good way for an "Open
Source" company to make money, IMHO.  You can always search for applicable
updates yourself and manually download them and then feed them to RPM, but
RHN makes it very painless.

If a critical security notice comes out for something I have installed,
RedHat can send me an email notification.  If I don't have the package in
question installed, or I already have a fixed version then they will know
this and not waste my time with an alert.  This makes it easier to pay
attention to the alerts that do get sent out.

There may be other Linux distributions where you can do approximately the
same thing for free without the fancy web site and the proactive
notifications from RedHat based on precisely what versions of stuff you have
installed.

In general the things that the RPM software package management system does
(completely independent from the RedHat Network service) are very cool.  You
can ask RPM exactly what versions of what packages are installed at any
time, you can point to any file on the system and ask "what package did this
file come from", you can ask rpm to validate the checksum on every file from
a package to ensure that that package is installed and not corrupt, and you
can even do this for every package on the system at once (ideal for the
neurotic system manager who always wants something he can run to check that
the system is ok).

So maybe the apt-get or some other package management system is somehow ten
times better than RPM, but RPM is 1,000 times better than what I'm used to,
so I'm not in a big hurry to look for something better.

G.

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