[wplug] Package grief

[mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 03:11:09PM -0400, harrold at sage.che.pitt.edu wrote:
> Sometime in October mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu assaulted keyboard and produced...
> 
> |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.
> |
> 
> i used to use spanish musketts to defend my apartment and man they were a
> pain in the ars'-no more spanish made guns for me. really redhat has gotten
> alot better in the last few years. i wouldn't hazard to comment on a two
> year old expirence with debian and compare it with say mandrake 8.x-or the
> latest from suse for that matter. i use redhat at school and debian at
> home. from what i understand about up2date you can get the same type of
> functionality from redhat as apt gives you in redhat.
Every one of my friends who use Mandrake complains about it's poor package
system.  `It sure looks nice but it breaks down easily,' is the gist of
their comments.  Some have switched to Debian.
At work we use Redhat servers, but they don't use up2date, they have
a proprietary system.

However APT is not restricted to Debian systems, Connectiva has created
an RPM backend for it and a distribution around that.  And you may want
to read about that and a comparison between APT and other similar systems
at http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/192/

> 
> since you brought it up. whenever i try to upgrade debian from stable to
> testing or unstable i always get an error: "like cannot override file
> xxxx.xxx it is owned by package xxxxxxxx" or something similar. this
> requires me to remove xxxxx with dpkg then readd it later. perhaps i'm
> doing something incorrectly. normally i change the sources.list file in
> /etc/apt then i run apt-get update, apt-get upgrade-dist. is there
> something i'm missing. i believe my roommate has had similar expirences
> with debian, but he can speak for himself. we only hear good things from
> the debian community about apt so it must be something with the way we
> caress the keyboard or something.
Upgrading to unstable sometimes involves a few additional packages to install
first, though I've gone through the standard upgrade procedure without
doing so many times; one can just install them later.

Currently, it's advised to update your sources.list to unstable, apt-get update
and apt-get install debconf apt-utils.  However it shouldn't hurt to do
an apt-get dist-upgrade without having installed those packages; just do
it later.  apt-utils is only a Recommended package (by debconf).

Then of course you do the normal apt-get dist-upgrade, and let it run.
Occasionally there might be a problem with a package in unstable, so
I generally advise running 'dpkg --configure --pending' and
'apt-get install -f' or dist-upgrade again if there is.

Also I usually check around the mailing lists and IRC channels to make sure
there aren't any truely major problems with unstable on the day I upgrade,
but there usually aren't.

You may be interested in a little reference card I prepared:
http://people.debian.org/~mrd/apt-dpkg-ref/

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;; Matthew Danish                         email: mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu ;;
;; OpenPGP public key available from:        'finger mrd at db.debian.org' ;;
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