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Both of these commands work and give you a working version of the yum command:

sudo apt install yum-utils
sudo apt install yum

That means that someone created them and put them there on purpose, for an actual reason. Why would someone want to run yum on Ubuntu?

N0rbert
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blue-tree-frog
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    Have you looked, https://packages.ubuntu.com/eoan/yum provides the maintainer, plus upstream link to the web site which has a wiki, timeline, roadmap, search and more. My guess is people who spend most of their time on red hat systems thus know `yum` really well find it a time saver (though red hat has moved to `dnf`, so it's legacy..) – guiverc Apr 11 '20 at 00:30
  • I've checked, it doesn't actually say why it exists. I actually tried it out in VM just to see and it still needs you to define repos. So it isn't just a frontend or alias for apt. It is actually meant to install RPMs. I can't see how that would work though because it would conflict with packages that are installed by apt. It was able to get it to pull down a package before it started segfaulting. – blue-tree-frog Apr 11 '20 at 01:00
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    A more answerable question might be "What is the yum package used for in Ubuntu?" The current question asks for the maintainer's intent, which seems much harder to answer. – user535733 Apr 11 '20 at 03:07
  • Sure but I know what it is used for. I just don't know why. Or really how it isn't just a really bad idea. – blue-tree-frog Apr 11 '20 at 03:22

2 Answers2

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The whole life of this package is presented on https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/yum .

It is removed from Debian unstable because of Python 2 deprecation.

See https://tracker.debian.org/news/1101794/removed-343-3-from-unstable/ and https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=951299 .

N0rbert
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They were useful if you wanted to install Fedora in a chroot on top of Ubuntu. See this script I wrote which does exactly that in order to install Cygwin inside the chroot. (Cygwin packages are available for Fedora but not for Ubuntu.) That script works on Ubuntu 19.10, from 20.04 onwards it doesn't work any more due to the removal of this yum package.

(As to why you'd want to install Cygwin on Ubuntu – the Cygwin runtime only works on Windows; it can run under Wine but with lots of issues/breakages due to Wine's imperfect emulation of Windows. But the Cygwin compilers run fine on Linux–they can be compiled as native Linux executables but generating Windows executables as compilation output. This is basically the same as the more common case of running MinGW cross compilers on Linux, except that the MinGW compilers produce fully native Windows executables that don't have access to the POSIX API, whereas the Cygwin compilers produce Windows executables that rely on cygwin1.dll and can use the POSIX API provided by that DLL. So if you have a C/C++/etc program which you want to compile to run under Cygwin, you can use a Linux build host to do the compilation, and then you can copy it to a Windows machine for execution. Some people, for various reasons, can find doing all their building on Linux easier than having to send part of the build to Windows – e.g. if you have a Linux-only CI environment, or a CI environment with lots of Linux build agents but a limited supply of Windows ones.)

Simon Kissane
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