Re: 'synaptic' removed from buster
On Sat 06 Apr 2019 at 11:35:08 (+0100), Dominic Knight wrote:
> On Sat, 2019-04-06 at 19:56 +1100, David wrote:
> > On Sat, 6 Apr 2019 at 19:08, Curt <curty@free.fr> wrote:
> > > My impression from my general reading here is quite a few people
> > > rely on
> > > the synaptic package manager. I use apt-get; it's pie-like
> > > simplicity
> > > comforts me.
> >
> > Speaking in very broad terms to make a general and somewhat
> > obvious point, we could say that Gnome and synaptic are examples of
> > tools written by experts to assist lower-expertise users.
> >
> > It follows that most more-expert users (apart from the developers)
> > tend
> > not to use these kind of tools themselves. So support channels like
> > this one
> > and IRC tend to lack people who are able to answer questions based
> > on their own use of these tools, because they don't use, or even care
> > about, these kind of tools.
> >
> > I have seen this in IRC. People join there to ask questions
> > about Gnome for example, but no-one providing support in the
> > channel is actually using Gnome themselves, because they prefer more
> > sophisticatedenvironments, even though it's the default GUI for
> > Debian
> > that all the newbie questioners are using.
> >
> > Newbie asks "how do I do X in Gnome" ... and no-one there knows the
> > answer :)
> > This might be less of an issue in other distros than it is in Debian.
> >
> > > Thing is, beyond its innate and fundamental heresy (a gui app
> > > running as
> > > root!), synaptic is the only GUI package manager available in
> > > Debian
> > > AFAIK (I'm uncertain whether kpackage is defunct or not).
> >
> > If I understand correctly, Reco mentioned another one earlier in the
> > thread ...
> >
> > On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 00:02, Reco <recoverym4n@enotuniq.net> wrote:
> > > The *unofficial* one is the existence of "gnome-packagekit". The
> > > thing
> > > needs users, and this is one of the ways of getting them.
> >
> > https://packages.debian.org/buster/gnome-packagekit
> > https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-packagekit/stable/intro.html.en
> >
> > I know nothing about it, I never tried it :)
> > I prefer using shell tools for package management.
> >
> > I certainly do use some GUI tools. 'meld' for example, for side-by-
> > side
> > diffs. If that was dropped from buster then I would notice :)
> >
> Lets take a look at installing gnome-packagekit and dependencies in
> Buster;
>
> Retrieving bug reports... Done
> Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
> serious bugs of unattended-upgrades (→ 1.11) <Outstanding>
> b2 - #905877 - regression in 1.4: upgrades random packages from
> testing to experimental (doesn't respect pinning?)
> Summary:
> unattended-upgrades(1 bug)
>
>
> Then again perhaps not just yet
I'm not sure unattended-upgrades is wise for buster.
But I'm happy that there are people who are prepared
to test testing with such packages.
OTOH unattended downloads are a different matter. I have
0 */3 * * * apt-get -qq update && apt-get -qq -d upgrade && find /var/cache/apt/archives/ -name '*deb'
in root's crontab which also sends an email whenever packages are
sitting in the cache. (My .bash_profile also checks that.)
Cheers,
David.
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