[Info-vax] VAXStation 3100

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Monday, 21 January 2019 08:36:24 UTC, hb  wrote:
> 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.

How many readers are aware of, and/or have used, YaST ?

For those who haven't, it's the setup tool (package manager, and
lots lots more) for the Suse Linux family, and has been for years
(during which it's been pretty useful in my experience).

"YaST arranges its administration tools into categories, where one category admittedly is package management, others include hardware (e.g. printing, audio), system (e.g. partitioning, bootloader, runlevels), network connectivity, network services, security (e.g. firewall, users), virtualization."
Not my words, they're borrowed from discussion at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST

Worth a look.

I had the pleasure of experiencing debian's apt a few times in the
last few months after hearing lots about it.

Call me a heathen if you will, but for those of no particular
religious faith (in OS terms anyway) I've seen no obvious reason
why apt, yum, etc, would be preferable to Yast, and lots of
reasons why I'd prefer Yast and I suspect others might too.

In the rest of the commodity IT market, the role of "high priest of
system configuration" is quite possibly going to be under threat as
the commodity world moves to the cloud, managed by the lowest cost
contractors. That's what "everyone" (in the commodity world) is 
doing, right? Elsewhere, the Interweb of Tat product people don't 
need any "high priest of system configuration" roles, they just need 
someone who will sign off the product as fit for purpose and ready
to ship, before finding themselves a nice new job elsewhere. Should
be easy enough, right?