Re: APT 0.0.16

[Steve Dunham <dunham@cps.msu.edu>]

Paul Seelig <pseelig@goofy.zdv.Uni-Mainz.de> writes:

> jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (Jason Gunthorpe) writes:
> 
> > APT 0.0.16 is available for both bo and hamm. Please let me know if there
> > are any bugs that got missed, I'm getting very few bug reports these days.

> It is running pretty fine, but there is one thing i personally find
> very disturbing about it.  When using apt to retrieve newer .deb
> packages from a Debian site it simply deletes the downloaded files
> after having installed them and doesn't bother asking first. :-(

That's just the "dselect" interface.  I'd suggest, after selecting
packages, that you go back to the command line and type:

  apt-get dselect-upgrade

(You might need a "-f" if you have dependency problems.)

I use the "apt-get" for everything but mass package selection.  (When
I want to add a single package I just do 

   apt-get install package_names_here

it fetches the package and all dependencies from the appropriate
servers and installs them.

> Whenever i download a .deb file i usually prefer to keep them around
> for possible future use, but apt is not very cooperative in this
> regard.  Sure, i could recreate the .deb files using dpkg-repack but i
> don't feel really comfortable with this option since it can't really
> recreate the original.

As I pointed out above this is actually a problem with the apt
"method" for dselect.  You should file a bug report against apt saying
that they should prompt before running "apt-get clean" in the apt
method of deselect and use the command line version until then.


I do have a feature request for apt: I would like to see a command
line interface to query the apt available cache.  At the very least it
should have something like "dpkg -l", listing all of the available
packages, with the one-line description and have another option like
"dpkg -s" that lists the detailed information for one package.


BTW, for people who are interested, if you carefully (with -p) untar
base2_0.tgz, chroot into it, install:

  apt, perl, libio-stringy-perl, libwww-perl, libmd5-perl, mailtools,
  and libmime-base64-perl.

(Note that it is libmime-base64-perl, not libmime-perl.)

Exit the chroot environment, tar it back up and you have an
"apt-enhanced" base set.  (You might also want to remove qftp, or
install libg++272 to resolve a broken dependency.)

The resulting file is 10688349 bytes long. (Verses 6866910 bytes for
the original tar file.)  There is some unncessary stuff from the perl
package, but this is good enough for NFS, hard drive, and CDROM
installs of the base.


Steve
dunham@cps.msu.edu


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org