Re: a few Qs about debian's apt
#include <hallo.h>
* tallison@tacocat.net [Mon, Nov 10 2003, 01:30:50PM]:
> Somewhere in /var. Sorry for being stupidly vague, but I am not in front
> of a Debian machine right now. /var/apt?
/var/lib/apt
> > 3) is there a way to just upgrade the local apps instead of all
> > local/kernel/base at the same time? if so what is the apt-get argument?
> >
>
> Not specifically.
>
> If you want to have certain applications at different version levels you
> can do this through the apt preferences file (man apt_preferences). In
> there you can set things in such a way as:
>
> everything is -stable
> except KDE* which is -testing
> except apache is fixed to 1.3.27
It must also said that Pinning (=tricks with apt_preferences) should not
be used as long term solution since they invite trouble like security
holes because of missing upgrade strategy for Testing (last thing I
remember is libssl which was installed by people from
woody-proposed-upgrades or testing and which was not updated from the
standard security update repository by apt because of having a higher
version).
If you wish just the latest KDE, use the Repositories for Debian stable
from kde.org. If you need latest XFree, visit backports.org.
> > 4) what do we do if we need to synchronize the package information
> > manually, say for some reason apt-get fails to include version
> > information on newly installed package; it's still using the old version
> > although the package has been overwritten by the latest version?
The final step of the installation (unpacking and configuring) is not
done by apt, but by the dpkg which actually cares about such problems.
Normaly there are ways to fix half-broken installation. As user you can
either install a fixed version or remove the broken one. Sometimes you
may need the "--purge" switch to really remove all the configuration
leftovers.
> > how do debian define non-base apps? in the bsds, non-base apps which is
> > called local apps are those not part of the vendor-approved base
> > distribution. for example, apache13 is part of openbsd 3.4 base system
> > while apache2 isn't so if were i to deploy apache2, it would be defined
You mean so called source-based distributions, right? That is not
philosophy of Debian to force you to install every package from source
(even using half prepared source packages aka "ports"). You get
almost everything in binary form, including packages from the
base/important/standard/optional/extra priority levels.
> A couple different options.
> You can build your own deb package for apache2
> or apache may have available "dummy packages" which means it claims to
> satisfy the dependency without doing anything at all. Kind of like a null
> function.
Yup. There is a tool called "equivs" used to create fake packages.
However you should guarantee that your self-compiled packages would work
exactly like the official ones.
MfG,
Eduard.
--
Es gibt keinen Königsweg zur Mathematik.
-- Euklid
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