[WBEL-users] Hello everybody!!!

[Ed Groth]

[jamey at beau dot org Thu, Dec 11, 2003]
> I think it's possible for a file store to be both a yum and an apt repository 
> - I just think John just picked one that worked (I think it was that yum is 
> closer to being able to randomly round-robin servers than apt is).  One of the 
> mirrors might want to aptify themselves, perhaps?

The most important issue in "round-robin", or using multiple repositories,
is that the rpm dependancies need to make sense.  So for example, having
both ximian gnome and redhat gnome would cause problems regardless of
the updating program.

AFAIK, a primary difference between apt and yum is that apt generates
the dependancies on the server, and yum generates its depandancies by
looking at the headers of the RPMS on the servers, which are stored
as seperate (.hdr) files.  It would seem that you could include both
a yum directory and an apt-get directory on the same server without
duplicating too much information.

Generating apt dependancies for about 3 GiB of rpms on our athlon system
takes about 10 minutes (feels like O(n**2) for the number of packages you
have), but it has to be done each time you add a file to the collection.
So they could really either be mirrored or generated by each apt server.
Provided the mirror uses rsync on the dependancies file, I don't think
it takes very long to get the differences either.

  Ed