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I often switch back and forth between Fedora and Debian based linux flavours learning their peculiar ways but today I bumped into something I need a little support on. I was looking for a way to list the contents of a repo in Ubuntu, something along the lines of repoquery in RedHat. And I ended up with this - a man page for repoquery present in Ubuntu's online manpages.

Shaken in my belief that apt-get and co are the package managers in Debians, I quickly ran another search, which resulted in this question.

But then how come there is a repoquery package for Ubuntu? Could I actually use yum as my package manager in Ubuntu?

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Lefty G Balogh
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1 Answers1

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Just because Ubuntu comes with apt does not mean that you can't use yum or pacman or whatever. However, that does not mean it's a good idea!

While it will work, it opens up a huge can of worms with package dependencies and similar -- yum and apt will not necessarily co-operate with each other, and might even fight over dependency libraries and the like, leading to your system possibly becoming a big heaping pile of broken packages and inconsistency. If you do this, it (first off) might not even work, and/or you run the risk of totally destroying your system.

Unless you know exactly what you're doing, and you're careful, installing and using yum as a package manager might end up with some very strange results. If you need to install a RPM package for whatever reason, it's best to use alien or a similar utility. Typically, though, using Alien is not necessary. Instead, most unavailable packages on Ubuntu can (typically) be found through PPAs, but be careful and only add PPAs from trusted sources/people.

Kaz Wolfe
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