Re: Maze of Twisty Turny Little Package Managers
On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 08:55:29PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 11/28/06 19:26, Paul E Condon wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 04:13:27PM -0800, Arlie Stephens wrote:
> > 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.
To be precise, aptitude stores additional history information of
packages installed by the dependancy in /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates.
The rest of package information are shared between apt-get and aptitude
since they are a part of APT tools which use /var/lib/apt/* for archive
information and record installed package state in /var/lib/dpkg/status .
Also aptitude has additional logging function which leaves log in
/var/log/aptitude.log. This makes it much easier when things go wrong.
For apt-get, you need to see log by dpkg in /var/log/dpkg.log and log
odf apt-get is not automatically logged.
In summary, the focus of each tool is:
dpkg tool: package file -> installation
APT tools = ( apt-get, aptitude, synaptic )
APT tools: remote/cdrom package archive -> retrieved package
Even APT tools use dpkg tool to install retrieved package files to the
system thus update /var/lib/dpkg/status.
> > 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 ;-)
Yes :-) Try them all by yourself and decide for yourself. Each tool
has merits. Question is not "which is better" but "which one suits
you".
There is another tool called dselect. It does remote/cdrom package
archive -> retrieved package function with or without APT. That was, I
think, the first tool for Debian remote archive iaccess. The creater of
it tells us his system is working now without APT tools happily now
using dselect with dpkg-ftp as remote file retrieval backend.
Cheers,
Osamu
--
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Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> Yokohama Japan, GPG-key: A8061F32
.''`. Debian Reference: post-installation user's guide for non-developers
: :' : http://qref.sf.net and http://people.debian.org/~osamu
`. `' "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software" --- Social Contract
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