High And Low-level Package Tools from the Linux command line by OnWorks

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High And Low-level Package Tools

Package management systems usually consist of two types of tools: low-level tools which handle tasks such as installing and removing package files, and high-level tools that per- form metadata searching and dependency resolution. In this chapter, we will look at the tools supplied with Debian-style systems (such as Ubuntu and many others) and those used by Red Hat products. While all Red Hat-style distributions rely on the same low- level program (rpm), they use different high-level tools. For our discussion, we will cover the high-level program yum, used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Cen- tOS. Other Red Hat-style distributions provide high-level tools with comparable features.

Table 14- 2: Packaging System Tools