[wplug] Package Management

[harrold at sage.che.pitt.edu]

Sometime in June Doug Green assaulted keyboard and produced...

|Hey all- can't you also install apt-get for RedHat? If so, does this
|cause any problems, such as messing up the rpm database (ie: does rpm
|"see" these packages too?). 
|Thanks,
|Doug
|

hey doug.

i've used apt4rpm before, and would be using it right now except i
accidentally deleted my repository. i'll probably try to get my repository
back up next week or so. if you're interested you can checkout the apt
stuff at freshrpms.

http://freshrpms.net/apt/

i believe they have a public repository available.

i tried out debian for a few months. when things would break i just didn't
know how to fix them. to debians credit, some of it was due to my own
lazyness. i must admit i found it frustrating to see posts saying just use
'apt-get install somepackage' and it just works. it worked fairly well for
me, until i upgraded to woody. when i upgraded to woody something had
broken, something noone mentions when extolling the virtues of apt under
debian. 

as i understand it, the package system is just a method of grouping files,
dependancy info, and other happiness. rpm, deb, tgz, etc. all have their
ways of grouping this information. some of them have arguably better
methods than others. 

apt is just a method for cataloging, sorting out dependancies, downloading
and installing packages. another method to consider is the ports method
used by bsd and now gentoo (www.gentoo.org). this looks interesting, but
i'm not sure if i want to dedicate the time just yet.

-- 
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