Re: apt-get to upgrade from hamm to slink.
On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Mark Phillips wrote:
> > > What happens if you don't have enough disk space?!!
> >
> > Well space in the archive is checked before download begins so it probably
> > shouldn't happen. But if you run out then it will abort will lots of
> > errors and never call dpkg. If you run dpkg and then run out you -should-
> > be fine but strange things have been reported...
>
> So what advantage is there of running apt-get over the more
> traditional - run mirror, then install using dselect?
mirror?!?! You want to mirror the entire 700 meg binary-386 directory and
then install it?? Ik.
apt-get does at least these things over that solution:
1) Downloads faster than mirror (esp if you are not on a modem :>)
Installs from a mirror faster than many other methods (no dpkg
-iGROBE)
2) Downloads only what you need and no more
3) Integrates multiple sources, such as non-us and main across multiple
sites with built in fail-over (in v3) and preferencing
4) Installation ordering is correct, safe, and advoids the 'hit install
till it works' problem some other methods have. Installation ordering
also deals with obsolete essential packages and other situations like
replacing mailers - screwy 'development' package depends, etc
5) Downloaded files are checked for proper md5 hashes, sizes, etc and
this is done very quickly + transparently
6) The system is carefully checked to advoid subtle breakage that is
common with manual dpkg (mismatched libc6/libc6-dev for instance)
7) Safe inter-dist upgrades, rexx-slink, bo-slink, hamm-slink and others
As well as making dselect safer to use for these upgrades should you
choose to go that way (not recommended!)
8) Safer handling of unmet deps in unstable dists, packages are not
installed unless they really will have all their dependents installed
too
9) Automatic correction and recovery of many common errors
10) apt-get install is just nifty.
You can use APT as a dselect method to replace dpkg-* if you
already maintain a local mirror and get the most important advantages,
there are also techinques to use APT over NFS to basically
mirror-on-demand debian for a workgroup. There are also techniques to use
APTv3 to 'mirror at work for home' with a zip disk and probably a few
other things you can do with it that nobody has discovered yet :>
Jason
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