Re: Two questions

[Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com>]

> I know I've asked these before, but the answers have fumbled out of my
> sieve-like brain.
> 
> 1.) What is the init regime on a Hurd system?

So far, the style of "init regime" is not a thing definitively set by the
Hurd.  What the Hurd does nowadays is run /libexec/runsystem and that
(usually a shell script) is responsible for realizing whatever the init
regime is.  Currently, there are two styles available.  The Hurd package
provides traditional BSD-style init that uses /libexec/rc and /etc/ttys.
Marcus has also put together a sysvinit package for Hurd, which replaces
/libexec/runsystem with one that uses the sysv-style init from Linux.


> 2.) There is some way of fetching those packages on the debian ftp
>     server which have been updated since the last time I installed?
>     I seem to remember there is some option to dpkg to do roughly what
>     apt-get upgrade does, but I don't recall what it is.  I would prefer
>     to fetch the .deb files actually, just so that I can do a full
>     reinstall without fetching anything through my slow 56K modem.

I use dselect's Update option and then its menu shows me all the packages
for which a newer version is available.