[SOLVED] Why do techs recommend YUM installs yet repositories and providers are ages behind?

Issue

I have been reading page after page after page about the benefits of using YUM package installer and how NOBODY should built installs from source files (which again makes no sense to me) yet the repositories and source builders always package files in Tarball format, leaving a TON of work (which usually ends up going wrong) to the individual instead of formatting SRPMs for the end user.

Has the world gone mad? I feel like I am taking crazy pills!

Solution

There are a few reasons to use a packaging infrastructure (like yum):

1. Creating "installations" is much easier to do, due to automatic dependency installation. From the simple

   yum install blah

   to creating chroots with mock/--installroot, or live CDs, etc.

2. Managing those installations. From the obvious

   yum update

   to operations which are much harder to do otherwise like:

   yum --security update

   ,

   yum --bz=1234 update-minimal

   ,

   yum --disablerepo=testing distro-sync

   .

3. Auditing those installations. The obvious examples here being

   yum history

   (not available in plain RHEL-5 atm.) and

   yum verify

   .

...however speed is not a factor, for instance Fedora rawhide moves as fast as gentoo.

RHEL-5 does not move that quickly, because it's 3 years old and is not supposed to break ... not because it's managed using yum/rpms. There are third party providers, like iuscommunity, which release co-installable newer releases for various packages. Or if you need to you create your own.

Or you can run a production server on Fedora rawhide or gentoo, both will have the latest packages really quickly ... I would not recommend that option though.

Answered By - James Antill

Answer Checked By - Mary Flores (WPSolving Volunteer)