[wplug] Package grief

mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu
Wed Oct 10 14:40:21 EDT 2001


Please don't start a flame-war over this but:

When I used to run RH 5.2 I pretty much gave up all hope on getting the
package system function cohesively.  I wound up treating the system like
a Slackware system and installing stuff from tar.gz all the time.  When I
used rpm I had to use --no-deps and --force all the time, which effectively
made it into a way to distribute a binary tar.gz.

It wasn't until I started using the Debian packaging system that I found
that it was possible to have a *working* packaging system.  Not only
a working one but one that went and did the dirty work of finding packages
and their dependencies, downloading them, installing them, and even
automatically upgrading them.

Now I don't break my package system, and when I come across a piece of
unpackaged software (rarely ;) I often opt to package it myself instead of
simply installing it into /usr/local (which is reserved for tar.gz installs)

When I went to install gnuplot on my laptop all I had to type was:
from binary package:

apt-get install gnuplot

from source package:

apt-get build-dep gnuplot     # as root, get build dependencies
apt-get source -b gnuplot     # get source and build it
  # can also be done as non-root, a different way
dpkg -i gnuplot_3.7.1p1-7_i386.deb

It worked fine the first time.

RPM is not the only Linux package system, just because RPMs tend to be
broken doesn't mean that you have to put up with it.

That is my experience with it.

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 01:23:41PM -0400, Weber, Larry A wrote:
> Is it just the packages I am trying to install or are most of the
> application packages for Linux difficult to install?  This week's grief is
> being caused by Gnuplot.
> 
> I downloaded the source, installed GD, and made an attempt to edit term.h to
> select my terminal type.  The build crashes when it cannot find vga.h.
> vga.h was not included in the source package.  I grepped for vga.h in all of
> the source files but cannot find an #include that refers to it.  Has anyone
> successfully install gnuplot?  I am using the RH7.1 distro and an old P133
> pc.  The source RPM I have is from RH.
> 
> Installing packages (applications) has been a continuous road block in my
> attempt to make Linux my primary op sys.  I usually spend a significant
> amount of time (days) plodding through someone's source files to get them to
> install.  Even then,I succeed less than half the time.  I have made it a
> rule not to even look at apps with a rev less than 1.0 and never use Beta's.
> 
> Do you think Installfests could be expanded to include package/application
> installation help?  Perhaps package/application installation basics could be
> considered for a GUM talk?  (It really bothers me that when I had to install
> Gnuplot on a Win98 system, it took less than a minute and is worked fine the
> first time.)
> 
> -laweber
> 
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> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug

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;; Matthew Danish                         email: mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu ;;
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