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leonbloy
Asked: 2010-04-21 14:51:16 +0800 CST

Can I mix yum and apt-get safely?

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I understand that yum and apt-get operate on top of rpm, so that the data about installed packages in a linux system is responsability of rpm; so that neither yum nor apt-get keep their own data about installed packages . Is this true ? It is safe to install some package using yum and install another (perhaps related) package using apt-get (or viceversa)?

UPDATE: I'm using Fedora 12

yum redhat apt

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    apt-get does not "operate" on top of RPM. apt-get was back-ported from Debian when RedHat based distros did not have a proper package management app.

    yum was developed for RPM-based distributions.

    And yes, you are correct, the package information is not maintained by the package manager, but rather by the actual packages, which include lots of "behind the scenes" information about the package, its dependencies, scripts that need to run on install/uninstall and so on.

    I personally do not know if a single reason where you can't use yum and apt-get at will, even though I would stick to one or another. Debian has dselect, dpkg, apt-get and all 3 essentially do the same job and you can use either whenever you want.

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  2. I am not sure what distribution you are talking about. But at least on Debian and derivatives apt-get has absolutely nothing to do with rpm. Apt-get uses dpkg as the base tool for managing packages.

    But I suspect you are using some Redhat derivative with a port of apt-get. If you provide more details someone can probably provide a better answer.

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  3. On Fedora, it's highly likely that any 'apt-get' command you are using is coming from APT-RPM, which is a port of the apt-get Debian tooling to work on top of RPM. You should check, though.

    In this context, yes, you should be able to use yum and apt-get (if it is from APT-RPM) interchangeably. A good way to check would be to see if you can get the apt tools to report on packages you've installed via yum.

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