Re: Maze of Twisty Turny Little Package Managers
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On 11/28/06 19:26, Paul E Condon wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 04:13:27PM -0800, Arlie Stephens wrote:
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> It appears that there are a lot of tools for managing packages and
>> dependencies on debian - dpkg, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, ????.
>> To what extent do these tools understand the same data, i.e. to what
>> extent can one mix and match between them?
>>
>> I notice some confusion (someone else's question) about which are the
>> 'official' or favored method in debian - but my confusion is even more
>> fundamental. To what extent is it safe to follow people's
>> recomendations, when one person habitually uses apt-get, another
>> mentions aptitude, etc. etc.?
>>
>> Related to this, I've a problem specific to a combination of aptitude
>> and my employer's internal servers. (We've got mirrors of several
>> linux distros, with company "value add", which I'm expected to use
>> rather than the official distributions.) The people maintaining these
>> sites don't seem to use aptitude at all, and I think they've broken
>> something, because aptitude always tells me that most upgradeable
>> packages are "held" at some current, lower version. (They claim
That's why I use apt-get.
>> not to have done this on purpose, which was my first guess, since I
>> can imagine them wanting to test and officially 'bless' new versions.)
>> Any idea what they could have done, and how I could work around it?
>> (I don't think it's debian itself, because my home system - which uses
>> the official sites - doesn't have any such problem.)
>>
>> Perhaps what I really need is some kind of FAQ for coping with the
>> large number of package management options and their confusing
>> interrelationships. Does any such thing exist?
>
> All the various programs that you find confusing are just different
> user-interface programs that all work with a single packaging system.
Yes, but...
> If a package is in the Debian repository, and if it can't be installed
> by using any one of the user-interface programs, then there is a bug
> in the package that needs to be reported to the Debian bug tracking
> system.
apt-get and aptitude store "history" in different formats. Thus,
aptitude seems not to do well on systems where you start out using
apt-get.
> Different people have different priorities as to what is important
> in the twisty turnies of program management. For me, I listen to
> the discussion. I try to avoid the program whose advocates shout
> the loudest. YMMV ;-)
>
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Is "common sense" really valid?
For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that
whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins
are mud people.
However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong.
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