Re: Debian Package HOWTO. Who ?
On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 12:43:11PM +0100, Egbert Bouwman wrote:
> No day without questions or complaints about the debian package system.
>
> Yesterday it was Hugo van der Merwe.
> A couple of more or less random selected lines from his message:
> > ... some easy way to sync the selections with
> > what is currently installed ...
> > I admit to not have researched this properly ...
>
> Each new user has to do his own research, has to make many mistakes.
> I think this is a ridiculous situation.
This is the best way to learn.
> It seems to be a policy of the debian-in-group not to talk about
> the mechanism behind the package system: files that are being
> read or written are hardly mentioned in the user documentation.
> Looks like they adhere to the data hiding principle.
It's a vast conspiracy!!! (Hint: it's all open source so you can find
out as much as is possible about it.)
> What we need is a HOWTO-like document that explains everything
> about the files in the background: which file is read or written
> or updated in what way when you use any option or command.
It's pretty much all in the man page. A HOWTO is not going to be much
easier to read. For instance see the FILES section where it explains
which files are read or written or updated.
> For instance what happens when you do a 'dselect update' with the
> apt access method. Or what happens or does not happen when you hit
> any of the action keys while in a dselect dependency screen.
> Not to mention all the dpkg options.
>
> Is there anybody who understands all (or most) of it and can write
> a decent howto ?
I rarely even use dpkg directly any more and never dselect. apt-get is
just much easier to use. Here's my howto: Use apt.
Cheers,
Chris
P.S.: I admit there are neat little tricks like dpkg --get-selections,
dpkg -S, dpkg -s etc. But these are what the man page is for.
Reply to: