Fwd: Etch

[Matthew Gillen]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> On 4/9/07, Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> wrote:
>> That set of commands would simply count the number of software packages
>> /installed locally/, not the total number available.  You'd want to count
>> packages found by dselect/apt-get against yum.  And then you'd have to
>> take
>> into account weather you're comparing the as-shipped configuration vs.
>> allowing one to twiddle with apt-sources / yum.conf.
> 
> Yes, I made a mistake in the command mentioned.  However, supported
> packages by Ubuntu is definitely far greater than say RHEL.  Here is
> Ubuntu Feisty versus CentOS 4.4.  I did not add any unsupported Ubuntu
> repositories, so it should not affect the calculation.  If someone has
> FC6/FC7 installed, let me know what you get.  Obviously, some
> consideration needs to be had for meta-packages and virtual
> packages...
> 
> $ aptitude search ~n | wc -l
> 23489
> 
> # yum list | wc -l
> 1649

Running that command on FC6 (with the Livna repo disabled so only the
default-installed repos are counted) yields 6797 packages.

I'd be curious to see a substantive diff of what those "extra" 16000 packages
really are, and how many of those I would use.

I found a local Ubuntu install, and found an example of what I was talking
about regarding lots of small packages vs. one big one:
For X fonts, Ubuntu has 82 packages (aptitude search ~n | grep "xfonts-" | wc
-l).  Fedora has 19 (yum list | grep xorg-x11-fonts | wc -l).

Basically what I'm getting at is that I'm not convinced that 23489 packages
have more useful software than 6797 packages.

> Actually, I am fairly confident in my claim.  That's partially why I
> switched away from Red Hat years ago.  I urge someone to prove me
> wrong here.  I would hypothesize that only Gentoo has more packages,
> since it is a from-source distro.

I agree that years ago the number of officially supported packages was rather
small, and I'd inevitably have to go hunting for useful software to install
manually.  But you'd be surprised at what's in the default repos nowadays.
The only software I typically manually fetch and install anymore is commercial
stuff like Acroread (because evince still gets confused by some of the busy
pdfs I need to read, and xpdf is just ugly).

Since I don't think the package-count is a good metric, and I can't think of a
better one, I think the only way to prove you wrong would be for you to get a
Fedora install and try to 'yum install' all the software you normally use.

Matt

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