on Tue, Jul 09, 2002, Dan Jacobson (jidanni@dman.ddts.net) 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. Debian's designed for something similar to your situation -- a widely distributed developer (and user) base, with network connections of varying quality, with frequent upgrades, allowing for in-place system maintenance. I've installed a dozen or more systems over 56K dialup, and maintained four systems over same. Though the T-1 at the office is handy.... ;-) > Indeed it seems dselect is now right out, never usable again, as it > now asks: dselect has a tendency to get borked. Frankly, with newer tools out, you're better off using apt-get or aptitude in its stead. One of your problems appears to be a corrupted (or garbled) package state. I haven't done major surgery on this for a while, and suspect dselect keeps its state somewhere other than apt. However, for apt, you can get state with: $ dpkg --get-selections \* > current-state If you want to modify this, open it with your favorite editor: $ cp current-state desired-state $ $EDITOR desired-state ...and select among 'hold', 'install', 'deinstall' and 'purge' for desired state, then: $ dpgk --set-selections < desired-state. If anyone does have suggestions for rectifying dselect state, I'd be interested in seeing it. > 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. Read up on them, or ask on list. Or don't use them and stop carping about them. Note too that there are various other ways to proceed, including creating a local mirror, which you maintain by means of your choosing. If you have the storage (2-10 GiB is more than sufficient) and means to have reasonably current CDs or DVDs shipped to you once a month or so, you can keep your system updated by way of an associate with a high-speed connection. Based on my experience, even tracking unstable, you'd rarely see more than a couple of CDs worth of updates monthly. Your mirror would serve up the packages locally, your local systems would point to your local mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list. Your updates should proceed rapidly from that point. > 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. That pretty much describes my situation, and it works for me, but my phone call is local and unmetered. Debian certainly offers flexibility to address a wide range of situations and needs. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Übersoft: We Aim. http://www.ubersoft.net/
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