Re: Upgrade advantage in Debian vrs. RedHat
On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 03:22:14PM +0000, Darryl Röthering wrote:
> Can someone explain the advantage many see in Debian upgrades vrs. RedHat?
Let me give you today's example:
upgrading ssh on debian:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
if that's not good enough put in a testing or unstable line in apt's
sources.list and apt-get -b source ssh. this should work on justabout
any debian version.
upgrading ssh on redhat:
beat head aginst the wall as you try and find a version of openssh for
rh5.x. HAHAHAHA. oh the pain. I gave up eventually and tried getting the
openssh source rpm. this needed rpm v4+ so I found and downloaded that.
this needed db3 so I grabbed and downloaded that. it also needed poht?
(can't remember the exact name)
ok. that's done.
rpm --rebuild openssh-blah-src.rpm
gives me a help screen. doesn't tell me what's wrong. no error what-so-ever.
just a fscking help screen. how effin unhelpful is that?
anyhow, eventually it dawns on me that there might be another package and...
low and behold, there is. I download that and install it.
now I'm set
rpm --rebuild openssh-blah-src.rpm
ladida... it has... dependencies... bugger. doesn't tell you which ones
haven't been met though. time to slug it out and detect and get that sorted.
(one bonus point to rpm here. at least it says the src rpm has dependencies.
src 'deb's' (no such thing really) have to be done by trial and error)
right. sorted.
ladida... gcc doesn't support some options. ok. I guess that CFLAGS will work
with rpm and get past that. THEN it can't find openssl. that's ok. It was
installed from tarball. I'll go and find a new one... bzzzzt... no go. none
that are for 5.x. snog it. try -L and -I flags in CFLAGS in the hope they
work. nyet. man rpm to find out if there's other env vars I can try. none
spotted. snog it. snog it all to hell.
time to install from tarball and so finally it works.
now I don't hav e THAT much experience with rpm. I could be missing major
plotholes here but hell. it shouldn't be this difficult. I've compiled
dep source 'packages' (for want of a better word) with less pain (except
for ones from unstable which were broken... not suprising for unstable
packages).
also, I have no plans to upgrade these servers from 5.x. i fear what
in gods name may break. I'll just build replacements with debian and
have the redhat boxes decomissioned.
> To take a concrete example, lets say I planned to start upgrading my home
> throwaway box (where I put up slink a few years back).
>
> I have only installed so far using dpackage.
>
> If I do apt-gets for a whole set of packages, I will get my add-ons upgraded
> to the latest and greatest (if I understand this correctly). But I still
> will have to make a plan & upgrade the *system* software, right? I.e.,
> *everything* isn't packaged.
erm. everything on your setup should be packaged unless you've manually
installed stuff from tarball or whatnot.
> Am I missing something? While I can see that getting the add-on stuff
> uptodate is of great value, I would rather be able to install a set of
> packages (with fall-back capability) to do an upgrade.
>
> Am I missing something?
Maybe. not sure. if you're planning to upgrade your box from slink to
potato (say) then I can't give you much in the way of advice except to
say a dist upgrade from potato to woody went fine for me with no
real problems (I wanted to give it a go on a box).
--
CaT (cat@zip.com.au) *** Jenna has joined the channel.
<cat> speaking of mental giants..
<Jenna> me, a giant, bullshit
<Jenna> And i'm not mental
- An IRC session, 20/12/2000
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