“Package management has always been a sore point for Linux, and
particularly for RPM-based distros. ‘Dependency hell’ is the term
commonly used for the pain involved in installing a piece of
software with a package management utility. Debian made things
easier with its Advanced Packaging Tool (APT), but that’s no
comfort to Red Hat and Fedora users. Connectiva Linux created
APT-RPM, which brings most of the benefits of APT to RPM-based
distros, but early versions bent some rules to get results.“Yum (Yellow Dog Updater, Modified) was created to address both
the perceived deficiences in APT-RPM at the time, and restrictions
of the Red Hat up2date package management tool. Yum handles
dependencies gracefully and supports multiple repositories, as does
APT-RPM. It also supports groups–tell a machine to process an
application group and it will install all of those applications.
This greatly simplifies managing multiple machines…”