RE: Considering Debian
David (and all),
Thanks for the reply. The part about mixing hand built stuff with pacages
in concerning as I do this quite often. The number of available packages is
encouraging but, nonetheless, I know occasions will arise. I've had to
build/install by hand X, glibc, postgres, the kernel, gcc, freeamp, and
others because of needing bleeding edge versions that fix bugs or because,
in debugging the current version, I needed a non-stripped binary.
Although the automatic installation abilities of apt sound nice, I find
that I usually want to actually download the, in my case, RPM so that I can
use it on multiple machines. That is, I question the benefit of this for me.
Anyway, I wall continue to explore this and, once again, thanks for the
info.
--Rainer
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David B. Harris [mailto:dbarclay10@yahoo.ca]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 5:27 PM
> To: Rainer Mager
> Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Considering Debian
>
>
> To quote "Rainer Mager" <rmager@vgkk.com>,
> # So, to make a long story short, how is the Debian package manager in
> this
> # regards? Do the same problems exist?
>
> Well, understand that there are two parts to the Debian packaging
> system. 'apt', and 'dpkg'. 'dpkg' is roughly equivalent to function, if
> not in features. 'apt' is a suite of utilities, and is generally what a
> user would use. Debian has what are called repositories; there are local
> mirrors in pretty much every country(I think ;). You can 'apt-get
> install <package>', and it will resolve dependancies for you. It'll
> install everything <package> needs, within limits. Sometimes two
> packages conflict, and sometimes you'll need to manually over-ride it(so
> that the other package gets removed). Anyways, it's pretty slick,
> compared to 'rpm' :)
>
> # How easy is it to mix package installed
> # pieces to pieces installed by hand?
>
> It's bad. Very bad. :) To make a long story short, just don't. If you
> *must* install something manually, pass "--prefix=/opt
> --sysconfdir=/opt/etc" or something to ./configure, to keep your own
> compiled apps seperate from the packaging system. A *lot* of problems
> that Debian users have is because they're mixing Sid or Woody(unstable
> Debian branches) packages in a Potato(stable Debian, currently) system.
> This causes numerous problems. A lot of problems are also caused by
> people side-stepping the package management system. Basically, if
> 'apt-get' and 'dpkg' don't want to install a package, you shouldn't.
> Things will break, and break badly.
>
> Thank being said, there are some 6000 packages or so for Debian's Sid
> branch. That's an awful lot of packages :) Most are pretty up-to-date,
> too, except for a few notable exceptions like Mozilla(which is currently
> stalled at M18). It's not too often that you'll have to do a manual
> installation of an app. If the occasion arises, it's not too hard to
> make your own .deb out of a source tarball, but I'll leave that exercise
> up to you :)
>
> David Barclay Harris, Clan Barclay
> Aut agere, aut mori. (Either action, or death.)
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