[Info-vax] VAXStation 3100

[hb]

On 01/21/2019 12:16 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/20/2019 4:00 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2019-01-20, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> On 1/20/2019 2:47 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>> On 2019-01-20, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>>> I used to be pretty impressed by that. But I no longer like
>>>>> that model.
>>>>>
>>>>> It does not scale well. It works great for 10-25 products. It does
>>>>> not work well for hundreds or thousands of products.
>>>>
>>>> Which is why on Linux, you have a layer on top of yum.
>>>
>>> Not really. You can get a GUI, but it does not really change
>>> anything.
>>
>> It does if your target audience is not only highly technical computer
>> experts but also more general purpose users.
>>
>> If you were looking at webpages instead of packages to install,
>> it would be like the difference between trying to extract information
>> by reading the HTML source code versus having a web browser render
>> the information in the HTML file in a easily readable format.
>>
>> yum technically does all this, but browsing for packages when you
>> are looking for something to solve a specific problem is a _lot_ more
>> viable when you have an organised list of packages you can browse
>> through organised by groups, especially when you are not a highly
>> technical computer expert.
> 
> The GUI make its easier to use for most users.
> 
> But my point was not about how to use it but about what it does.
> 
> I don't like to see application stuff splattered out over a half
> dozen directories mixed with with other applications.
> 
> I want a single directory tree per application.
> 
> And I don't see the GUI help with that.

You probably all know this. The main purpose of yum (CLI or GUI) is to
find packages, to check and possibly to resolve dependencies, and to
install these packages with the package manager, here rpm. Therefore yum
and equivalent package mangers for other distributions are sometimes
referred to as the high level interface to the package managers.

Yum can download the packages, the .rpm files, without installing them.
You may need to install the "downloadonly" plugin. As far as I know, the
package manager rpm can't neither install into a single directory tree
nor extract the files from a package. However, you can create an cpio
archive from the package and extract that archive into your tree. On
other distributions other package managers may be used, for example on
Debian it is dpkg. The dpkg-deb tool can extract files from the Debian
packages, the .deb files.  Debian's high level interfaces to the package
manager can download packages without installing them as well.