After some time away from linux, I'm thinking of maybe trying it again. In the process of deciding which distros to try I noted something about package managers ...

1. RPM and Yum are used by Red Hat (and thus also by Fedora?) Why two different package managers? Is Yum just a front end for RPM?

2. Slackware includes the RPM package manger in addition to its own. I learned this by typng "man rpm" on a system running Slackware. I seem to recall that RPM stands for Redhat Package Manager, so I've no idea what it is doing in Slackare. Perhaps slack's own package manager is really just a front-end for RPM?

3. Based on the above, are all/most/many linux package managers really just RPM?

4. Could one, in any Linux, use *only* RPM and ignore/bypass the "default" package manager without problems?

Yum, aka "Yellowdog Updater, Modified", is an obsoletes / dependencies-solving package manager.


No, it stands for "Red Hat Package Manager", Red Hat being the companies name.


No.


No.

No.

for "rpm's" you left out SUSE Enterprise Server/Desktop 11 ( SELS/SELD 11 )

This non free OS ( like RHEL ) uses "zypper" as apposed to "yum"

and so dose OpenSUSE 12.2 & 3

as unSpawn pointed out
yum and zypper are " obsoletes / dependencies-solving package managers "

for the most part they have fixed the 'ancient' rpm HELL ( like windows .dll hell) of the rh8,9 and RHEL 3,4, days

well what are YOUR needs ?
fedora will be a good choice for some
BUT the 100% Completely WRONG choice for others

the same goes for RHEL
for some it would BE the best choice, for others the VERY worsted choice

You can see the package management systems here
http://distrowatch.gdsw.at/dwres.php...age-management

There's not much to choose, in reality. But you need to stick to the default. When you install Linux, the package manager will list everything in its database. Subsequently, it can check that database to see if you have the necessary dependencies for new programs. If you used two systems, neither would know what the other had installed.

The commonest system is Debian's, because so many Linuxes are based on it.

Slackware has a very basic system that doesn't check dependencies, but that doesn't really matter because the entire repository is on the installation disk.

1 members found this post helpful.

Fascinating. That clarifies matters for me and also yields new information. Thank you.

Thanks for that link! Good web page!

Actually, Since Red Hat Linux became discontinued and forked into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, It no longer stands for 'Red Hat Package Manager', but instead is officially a recursive acronym, 'RPM package manager'.


I couldn't see it mentioned, so i'd just like to add.
RPM is the low end package manager. Zypper and yum are high end package managers that work with repositories to fetch .rpm packages and then install them automatically with the rpm package manager.