Re: highly touted package management tools vs. modem user
[only posting to debian-user]
Dan,
To be honest, I don't know why I decided to reply to your post. You come
across as an angry, ungrateful fellow with nothing better to do than
whinge about why Debian is not living up to your expectations. That may
or may not be your intention, but it is how you are being perceived.
Nevertheless, I am going to attempt to help you where I am able.
First of all, you are likely to continue having problems, for you have
rather conflicting goals for your system. You wish to be able to keep up
with a distribution that is changing daily, but do it on a
20-mins-per-day internet connection.
You claim that the tools don't work, then admit that you don't really
know how to use them.
I don't understand why you are trying to use wwwoffle with the packaging
tools. Wwwoffle is for browsing previously-accessed (ie. downloaded)
websites later when you're offline. If you want to do the same thing
with apt-get, just use the -d "download only" switch while you're
online, then do the real upgrade when you're offline. Multiple PCs? You
can create your own apt-gettable archive with your existing debs using
apt-move.
I've made some comments on your situation below...
Dan Jacobson wrote:
>
> 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]
All you have to do to fix this is go through all of those 17 packages in
dselect and mark them as 'purge'. They are probably currently marked as
'install', which is why dselect wants to install them.
> 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.
>
> 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.
Using wwwoffle with the apt tools seems like a very odd solution to me.
You've probably already read my comments on this at the top of this
email.
> 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.
Well, when you've solved your problems you'll be in the perfect position
to help the maintainer of this documentation add your situation to it.
> 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.
I've never tried dealing with your particular problem before. These days
my debian system is connected permanently to the internet with a cable
modem, but it's only been that way for the last few months. Before that
I had a standard 33.6k dialup connection, although I had untimed local
calls.
It was perhaps still more "snazzy" than what you are using, but still I
did the majority of my package installs from CD. I never had anything
like the problems you are facing because I only followed (and was quite
happy with) the stable distribution.
My method was to have the apt-cdrom generated URLs in my sources.list
for most of the time. Any package that I wanted would come from the CDs.
If I wanted to get a more up-to-date package for a security or bug fix,
I would change the sources.list to point to a debian mirror on the
internet, put up with the 2Mb download with the 'apt-get update',
install the package specifically with 'apt-get install package', and
then switch back to the CD-only setup afterwards.
> Ah, just another class struggle where the air conditioned designers
> don't understand the little guy.
I think you're being paranoid again. Most of these guys are doing their
work for free. You should feel lucky that you're getting anything, let
alone something the size and quality of Debian.
Anyway, the person with the most power to help you is you. If you think
that you're being overlooked, it's up to you to be active in changing
that (and I don't mean by whinging about it).
> I mean who would go out of their way to say use a smaller monitor, or
> old fashioned connection, etc.
>
> 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.
My method outlined a few paragraphs above should be enough for this.
Browsing what's new without actually having to download the package list
is a big ask. Have you tried browsing the package description pages on
debian.org?
I hope I have actually managed to help you, but I do think you should
think about what you are trying to and whether or not it is actually
reasonable before flaming thousands of developers and users for not
looking after you.
Have a nice day.
Matthew
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