Re: How do you process package dependencies?
On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 05:51, alex wrote:
> I must have phrased my questions poorly. What I was really asking for
> was an explanation of the mechanics of installing a package and its
> related packages and where to put them. How would it done if there
> wasn't something like apt to do it for you and you had to do it
> yourself? (Sort of like not having someone around to solve a
> mathematical problem for you.).
>
> I can't seem to find the answer on the web .
If I were forced to do it by hand, I would download the package, install
with dpkg -i. If any dependencies are missing, download those packages
and restart on step 2, and passing all of the .deb files to dpkg -i.
However, in practice, you will never, ever need to do that. Apt and
dselect will do that for you, and nobody actually goes to the debian
archive and downloads packages by hand.
Apt maintains a dependency database that is what is fetched when you do
an `apt-get update', which retrieves a Packages file from the Debian
archive. This file contains a list of all packages in the archive and
their dependencies, so when you do an ``apt-get install foo'', apt looks
up foo in the Packages file and recursively determines what other
packages need to be installed, then downloads them all. The Packages
file itself is built on the server with the dpkg-scanpackages command,
but that's of no interest to a Debian user.
--
Dave Carrigan
Seattle, WA, USA
dave@rudedog.org | http://www.rudedog.org/ | ICQ:161669680
UNIX-Apache-Perl-Linux-Firewalls-LDAP-C-C++-DNS-PalmOS-PostgreSQL-MySQL
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