Re: KDE 3.2.2 for Woody... Careful upgrading..
Jesús Roncero Franco writes:
> On Tuesday 20 April 2004 20:39, Dominique Devriese wrote:
>> Yes. Meaning that it needs uninstalling other packages and
>> installing new ones instead.
>>
>> > Additionally, I disagree with you. I do not like
>> > dselect. aptitute may be good but the interface really sucks
>>
>> It's not about an interface, it's about apt-get's logic being
>> insufficient to properly figure out the correct solution for
> Well, then how are the official debian sid packages made? Those seem
> to upgrade fine. Maybe it is that people is too used to apt-get
> dist-upgrading quite easily. Why then debian relies on apt-get and
> not on aptitude :-?
First, there are difficult apt versions, apt's logic is already a
little bit better in sarge and sid. It's just very bad in woody, and
Debian officially recommends to not use it for upgrading to sarge.
Second, there's a difference between "apt-get dist-upgrade" on the one
hand and "apt-get install" and "apt-get upgrade" on the other hand.
The OP was using the latter, and these are completely unsufficient for
major upgrades, which is what I was trying to make very clear with the
capitalised text. "apt-get dist-upgrade" is not all too bad ( in
sarge ), but still does not succeed in completely figuring out the
dependencies properly in all situations.
Third, the reason why Debian "relies" on apt-get ( meaning that
apt-get is priority important, not at all meaning that Debian can't be
used without apt-get ), and not on aptitude is simply that apt came
first. Aptitude is strictly better, and if hit had been available at
the time, I'm sure aptitude would have been chosen over apt-get.
Fourth, just a last comment: as a developer who has looked at the dpkg
and apt code ( and you may believe me or not, I don't care, I'd just
like to make this clear ): Debian's packaging tools are pretty poorly
coded. People often argue about how great apt-get is, compared to Red
Hat's and Mandrake's tools, but what they mean is that the Debian
package repository is pretty good, this has nothing to do with apt.
The problems with dpkg, apt and aptitude are, briefly:
1 They do not properly make use of any sort of database. dpkg uses
its data in a very slow manner. Apt-get uses a different database,
and uses it in a very slow manner as well. Both suck.
2 They don't provide certain extremely useful features like keeping
track of which packages were *explicitly* installed and which
weren't, in order to provide much more useful dependency resolution.
3 They don't have a proper graphic, user-friendly interface. This is
partly fixed by certain recent programs like aptitude, synaptic and
others, but none of these succeed in reaching the level of ease of
use necessary for ordinary users, partly because of the above
reasons as well.
Anyway, IMHO, a lot of things here require fixing. If I had time, I'd
love to write a proper apt replacement, but I don't have time,
unfortunately.
cheers
domi
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