Re: highly touted package management tools vs. modem user
Ok, I'll bite...
Dan Jacobson wrote:
> Well, my conclusion about Debian's highly touted package
> management system in regards to mostly offline modem
> users is: being that those working in the Debian Towers
> all have snazzy net connections, at least certainly those
> working on the elite apt team, they'll never know the
> frustrations incurred by those who's items in
> /etc/apt/sources.list are not all necessarily on line,
> and also have a woody CDROM set.
The very notion of 'Debian Towers' is absolutely absurd.
>
> Indeed it seems dselect is now right out, never usable
> again, as it now asks: 17 packages upgraded, 0 newly
> installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get
> 6310kB of archives. After unpacking 5915kB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Ok, never mind that. I
> had just used apt-cdrom to restore the CDROMs after
> foolishly removing them from sources.list. Well, at
> least there are other tools left. As you might tell, I
> feel threatened by all these tools I don't understand.
>
> Apparently aptitude can somewhat still be used, at least
> with wwwoffle giving it http 404's about things i don't
> want to upgrade anyway. I have to repeat the "g" for
> each CD though.
If you're using CDs only then you should comment out any
online sources in /etc/apt/sources.list. Just uncomment them
when you do want to use online sources, and of course run
'apt-get update'.
>
> Wait, there might be neat ways to use this apt stuff with
> wwwoffle ... but it still would require hand pruning of
> the things you don't want from wwwoffle's outgoing list.
>
> OK, we see /usr/share/doc/apt/offline.* , where he again
> describes a situation different than mine. I am rural
> mountantop with slow costly phone line and 2 month old
> woody CD set. For the Debian package management tools,
> they either want you to have just the CD set, or be
> connected to the net and not concerned about download
> times.
>
> Anyways, the answers posted to my post will be from users
> who "think they remember a solution from back when they
> didn't have their current snazzy connection" I'm sure.
>
> Ah, just another class struggle where the air conditioned
> designers don't understand the little guy.
>
> I mean who would go out of their way to say use a smaller
> monitor, or old fashioned connection, etc.
What the? Class struggles? With Debian? An OS distribution
assembled entirely by volunteers?
For the record, I installed Debian on a PI 133 with only 8
megs of RAM and 160Mb of HD space (the drive later expired
and I reinstalled it onto a 2.1 Gb SCSI drive, this time
with the full 16 Mb of RAM working). It was only used as a
network server, but I have a hard time thinking of any other
modern OS or OS distribution that would have achieved that
feat. Moreover, Debian developers "go out of their way" and
attempt to support many more architectures than anyone else.
Debian is as accessible as it gets...
>
> Anyway, my dream is: if something is unreachable, assume
> I am offline... I mean I need a HOWTO for users with a 2
> month old CD set, 28 to ~40K modem speed costly brief
> connection, who only want 5% of the upgrades, and I
> suppose only want to "update" once every two weeks. And
> in the mean time just browse a list of what's new.
If you're using KDE then kpackage can show you what is "new"
and what has been updated. (However, "new" would appear to
mean items that are genuinely new, items that are not
installed and items that have been updated since you
installed them). This is actually one place where Corel's
Corellinux distribution did very well with its CorelUpdate
utility - I would in fact love to be able to get CorelUpdate
running on my woody/sid Debian system, but that's a digression.
The problem seems to be that you're using 2 month old woody
cds and are trying to update just a few things without
apparently updating the dependencies, which isn't really
doable. You should also avoid using dselect in your
situation as it has the annoying habit of turning
'recommends' into 'depends' (from what I recall, anyway - I
largely stopped using dselect because of that; dpkg and apt
are far better that way). Those cds would have been intended
to install woody from, saving the user from the mass
downloads necessary for a full network install or if network
installs aren't practical. You can of course update
afterwards as updates become available, but as you say that
requires a reasonably good connection - that is the nature
of net-based installs and upgrades. If you don't like that
or can't do that then you can always wait until the full
woody cds come out whenever woody is released as stable.
Your other option would be to have acquired a set of potato
cds (any release), installed that and performed the small
release upgrade to the most recent release of potato.
--
David P. James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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