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Re: dselect ignorance



On Friday 23 August 2002 09:24 am, Chris Hilts wrote:
> > Otherwise, my question is this: If I find an xxx.deb package at some
> > site other than the debian stable distribution and wish to use it how
> > should I proceed?  Download it?  Put it where?  Simply run dpkg install
> > xxx.deb?  Edit sources.list and use apt-get install xxx.deb?  Or is
> > dselect the preferred method to best manage dependencies?  If dselect is
>
> If it's available in a source that apt can use, add it to
> /etc/apt/sources.list.  If it's a standalone .deb, just download it
> someplace convenient (your home directory will work fine).  Switch to root
> (use 'su') and dpkg --install filename.deb.
>

If the package has a relationship which is currently not satisfied the install 
will fail with a message like:

foo depends on bar (>> 2.3) but it is not installed
It will then be your responsibility to find this version of bar and install 
it.  This is the advantage of apt or dselect or whatever.  They have the 
package list AND the ability to retrieve an item from it.

dpkg is the actual package management tool.  Whenever something is removed, 
added, etc dpkg is how that gets done the other programs are just frontends 
or wrappers.  But dpkg is not as kind to the new user.



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