News from our package manager “urpmi”

News from our package manager “urpmi” :
Inherited from the Mandriva distribution, Mageia’s default package manager is URPMI. It offers a wide range of features to manage software repositories, install, update and remove applications packaged in rpm format. This standardized format is adopted by many well-known distributions, such as Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Suse and OpenSUSE.
Urpmi is also used to update your distribution.
This tool comes with many tools :
– urpmi, urpme to install and remove applications,
– urpmq to search for an application by querying repositories    
– urpmf to search for a package from the files it contains    
– urpmi.update to update your system and applications    
– urpmi.addmedia and urpmi.removemedia to add, remove your software repositories.

It is also the core application of :
– rpmdrake, the GUI to install/uninstall packages
– drakx, the Mageia installer from a DVD or the network
For more information, see mageia’s wiki page.

The arrival of “dnf” in the distribution in recent years should also be noted. However, urpmi remains a major and founding tool for Mageia,appreciated by its users for its ease of use and efficiency. That’s why this package manager is maintained, continues to be stabilized and improved as new versions are released. Moreover, it is compatible with rpm from versions 4.9 to 4.16 as well as with perl from versions 5.8 to 5.32 and benefits from their latest evolutions. See here and here.
URPMI and URPM documentation has been improved as can be seen here and here.  It’s also well documented and translated in our documentation.

What’s next?
The future is bright for URPMI. Indeed its development is not at a stand still and should take new directions.
It is planned to use the dependency manager libdnf/libsolv which bringsa finer management of those, especially with the so-called “weak”dependencies (to do this we are waiting for a stabilization of their programming interfaces).
In order for urpmi to be perfect, we need feedback from what doesn’t work. To do this, they must be uploaded in our bug tracker.