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Re: WAS: Curious...Are most of you in tech-related--NOW, I gave up and went back to Mandrake :-(



Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 10:47:18AM +0200, Alaa The Great wrote:
> > 
> > the RPM format itself seems to have all the features of deb,
> 
> It has most of them, although it's missing one or two. I'm reliably (I
> think) informed that it doesn't have diversions, for instance.

In general the capabilities are very similar.  Discussing the pros and
cons of those two are like doing the same for emacs and vi.

RPM does allow you to --relocate one path to another path.  But if I
understand where you would go with that the answer is that you will
need to --relocate on the command line each time you upgrade to a new
version of the package as it does not "stick".

And there is the reverse as well.  Is there a way to verify the
installation of an installed deb package similar to 'rpm --verify'?
Is there a way to correct the permissions and ownerships of the
installed files of an installed deb similar to 'rpm --setperms' and
'rpm --setugids'?

<rant>
Don't laugh, I live in this environment.  Usually it is some corp
written thing which includes a script which has not seen any code
review.  Admins should have programming skills especially at the
higher levels.  But remember the job is done by the lowest bidder.
Script is run by local admin doing what they were told to do by corp
admin.  Script munges things that it should not munge.  AIDE is a
godsend to find these issues and send alert that things are now
different.  But a --verify would be better because AIDE does not tell
me what is wrong, just that things changed.  It does not tell me what
package(s) need fixing.  I would rather have a package verify run
nightly in place of the nightly AIDE run.  On second thought in
addition to it.

Fortunately 'apt-get --reinstall install package' usually does the
work easily enough to correct the problem.  But then the next AIDE run
will have lots of noise and I am still not sure if things are really
back to the right place as I would be if there were a --verify option.
Maybe I should just nightly reinstall the entire system on every host
because you just can't be too sure.
</rant>

> The missing features probably wouldn't be hard to add if somebody wanted
> to, though.

And very easy for the reverse as well.  The md5sum file already
exists and could be verified from that.  Sounds perfectly suited to a
dpkg-verify script.  Hmm...  Hopefully someone will just tell me this
work is already done by a method of which I am not aware.  That would
be great.

> > what is missing is tools and a tradition of best practices.
> 
> Amen.

Complete agreement.

Bob

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