I've been using urpmi for a number of years. I only started using yum recently when I bought a laptop and installed Fedora. I decided I like yum better than urpmi. (To each his own.) Since Mandriva has yum in its official repositories, I thought I'd investigate how you go about using it.

Instead of wondering why someone wants the freedom to choose, you may want to wonder why on earth Mandriva offers an application with no purpose.

I know I said that I am through with this thread, but I opened it by mistake and I could not let the following comment pass (I suppose I am just weak that way):Yum is found in the Contrib (read contributed packages) repository. Unless (after more than ten years of using Mandriva - aka Mandrake) my understanding is very wrong, the Contrib repository is comprised of packages 'contributed' by the Mandriva user community. Contributed packages are not maintained directly by the Mandriva development team, and may not all work correctly (although most do). Since yum is not used by the majority of the Mandriva user community, it is probable that it fell through the cracks when Mandriva modified their repository format around the time Mandrake merged with Conectiva. Up to that point in time, the Mandrake repositories used a format similar to RedHat (and probably Fedora) and was considered to be a Redhat based distribution (much as Ubuntu is considered to be based on Debian).

If you want the yum package to be modified (fixed) so it can work with the Mandriva repositories why do you not make a bug report on bugzilla rather than pointlessly complain about it on the LQ forum? If no one tells the development team that there is a problem, the problem may never get fixed. Alternatively, if you are a software programmer, you may be able to fix it (yum) yourself and submit your work to the Mandriva development team so others can enjoy the result of your effort. As I see it, you have three choices:

1. Continue to complain about the fact that yum does not work with the Mandriva repositories.

2. Fix yum so it works with the Mandriva repositories.

3. Make a but report on bigzilla in hopes that the package will be fixed in a future Mandriva release.

What do you want to do?

Here's how things are.

RPM packages pack sofware and metadata. From the programer's point of view, the main part of this meta-data is dependencies, but there are also descriptions, summaries…

URPMI and YUM systems both achieve the same goal in a different way: they put the RPM files in a predefined structure, and index all the files' metadata in special files that are used by a GUI, which will then be able to 1/ inform the user, 2/ fetch whatever is needed to please the user.

So, what did Mandriva do? They created a directory structure, put all treir RPMs inside, and generated the URPMI index, which you probably downloaded using the instructions at easy-urpmi.zarb.org. That's at most 1% of the total work. More than 99% of the work is creating a good set of RPM packages in the first place.

What do you have to do? You can reuse the RPMs, and thank Mandriva for that. They did the work and tho whole community get it for free. You then have to do that extra 1% of work for YUM: create the YUM directory sturcture and index; and there's probably a tool for that.

Conclusion: No, urpmi repos aren't compatible with yum; they never were supposed to be and never will. But at the core are the same RPM files. Use them and create your own repository, as has already been said to you. Then you'll know what to put in yum's config file.

Yves.

Complain?? The point of this thread was to ask a thoroughly reasonable and relevant question. Though the unreasonable attacks and my attempts to fend them off have made it degenerate somewhat. I suppose I should just abandon it.

This is actually a very good and reasonable suggestion. In fact I had been considering it even before finding out if it had already been done.

But I haven't and probably won't. Mandriva seems to be putting up a valiant fight supporting the URPMI suite of tools in a world where most other other major distributions have divided into camps--mostly apt and yum. I doubt that the good folks at Mandriva would really appreciate my work because it would work against the effort that they are probably proud of. And I have no idea, really, if there are any users who would.

So lets see, you chose to use the Mandriva distro, knowing it uses URPMI, and not yum or apt. Then you decided not to fix yum to make it work, because you assume no one will appreciate it, even though you have no idea who would appreciate it. So instead of filing a bug, or trying, you just whine on and on about the stubbornness of the community, and how they should just switch to the mainstream apt and yum..I've got an idea:

1. Stop using mandriva if you hate it, its developers, and its community so much.

2. Fix it or ask the devs about it, you might be surprised about what you find out.


However, I know what you will do instead. You will be too lazy to fix it or ask the devs, you will continue to yell at people on this forum who point out that one of those things need to be done, and you will continue assuming that no one wants it, and use that as an excuse to not do anything about it. All the time you've spent posting hostile remarks to people could've been spent just filing a bug report. Have fun.

I started using Mandriva (actually, Mandrake) Linux at, I think, version 8.1. I had never heard of urpmi, yum or apt. I chose it because I had tried Red Hat and had difficulty. Mandrake seemed easier.

Lorienthin, this is your first post and you chose to make it condescending and bating a fight. That's a pity for you and for the community you could be contributing to.

Baiting is all you have been doing this whole thread. I enjoy that you, instead of actually addressing the root of my point, that you are unwilling to do anything about this but complain, take two relatively insignificant portions of my post, and then bring in my post count.

Enough said.

Hi, I have been using smart, and checking the help files I discovered that smart is able to work with many types of repository.

I didn't know this before, so share with you now.

smartpm has a "synaptic like" gui that I find intuitive.

I have not used yum extensively, so have no comment, but

If a dev team are going to make a new part, why not smart?

Check thier site for details,

http://labix.org/smart

Regards, Glenn

A possible easy solution to using yum on Mandriva
 

As has been mentioned previously, yum can be used to create a local repository for use with Mandriva.

If you want to use yum's update function, then you need to ensure that your local repository is current.

To set up the repository, you would need to download an existing Mandriva repository from one of the mirrors, and then use rsync on a regular basis to keep it up to date, by reference to the mirror.

Then use yum-arch to "yummify" your local repo regularly. Point your yum repo configuration to your local "yummified" repo.

I have never tried this, since urpmi suits my needs, but it seems quite feasible.

Obviously not a good idea if you pay for your bandwidth by the megabyte or if you are still using dialup. :-)

My guess is 99.999% of mandriva users use urpmi! If KenJackson insists to use yum on mandriva let him be. But i would advice him to not ask on this forum 'cause nobody wants to switch from urpmi to yum. The only advice that I've got for him is to try out PClinuxOS, because they used to be based on mandriva and they use yum as package manager and they have a similar software to the mcc.

cheers

First, notice that this discussion is nearly a year old.

But you invoked a number. That's interesting, even if it's just a guess. 99.999% means that you are guessing that 1 person out of every 100,000 Mandriva users uses some other tool than urpmi.

The obvious question is: How many Mandriva users are there?

The Mandriva site may be able to answer that question about the number of users.

It may be a year old, But I remember checking it out like it was yesterday.

I think you've got Buckleys chance of getting the devs to switch to yum, but if you work it out, submit your findings to the mandriva dev team.

I doubt they will forsake urpmi, gurpmi and the rest of the rpm packager, when there is already kpackage, smart package manager and check-install, and the other well known and widely used rpm tools well into developement.

And working quite well.

Thank you, let us know of your progress, I'm interested.

Cheers and all the best, Glenn

ps, I use smart almost exclusively, and check-install to build packages from source. ;)

ok, i didn't mean to discuss numbers... but i meant to discuss alternatives linux distribs, so far i understood something! This topic or rather it's creator isn't willing to have some sort of discussion!
@ KenJackson: maybe you haven't found a GNU/Linux Distrib that would please your taste. I would say "damn you, stop winning!", every post that you made is not interesting except the 1st post. All those post of yours are complains, make your own distrib and stop winning. You are a coder, right? you said in one of your posts that you won't fix/patch yum in order to make it work with uprmi. Ok understandable, then ask to lock this topic as you won't have your damn answer!

99.999% is not a number! it's a ratio.

A ratio is a number.