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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