Centos – Why does Debian have RPM and Yum packages

aptcentosdebianredhatyum

I know that Debian comes with an awesome package manager called APT which is capable of installing .deb packages.

I know that RHEL comes with a package manager called Yum and is capable of installing .rpm packages.

But, I have discovered that I can do apt-get install yum and apt-get install rpm.
The latter I can presume that it is for installing rpm packages just like I install with dpkg. But what's the use of the former? I have installed it on my machine and from what I've seen I can use both APT and Yum on a Debian system, am I correct?

If I have APT and Yum, can I use features like CentOS Software Collections while keeping packages installed via APT?

Best Answer

In short: no you can not!

The longer version:

RPM must be there due to LSB compliance (supported by Debian at least up to end 2015)

I've surfed for a while without any real answer for the presence of YUM.

Yum is a manager build on top of rpm, therefore not relevant per se (unless LSB requires it), so I've issued:

utente@debian:~$ aptitude search ~D^yum$
p   createrepo - tool to generate the metadata for a yum repository
p   dtc-xen - SOAP daemon and scripts to allow control panel management for Xen VMs
p   mock - Build rpm packages inside a chroot
p   yum-utils - Utilities based around the yum package manager

In summary it seems that a small number of packages in Debian depends on yum per se. If you recursively try to check which of these packages is a dependancy on its turn, what you get is that they are not (with few recursions).

Basically yum is used to create rpm repos from within a chroot in debian or to make use of the XEN SOAP daemon.

Related Topic