Re: [MiNT] OSMD - introduction (fwd)

[Michael Schwingen <rincewind@discworld.dascon.de>]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 10:39:35AM +0200, Jo-Even.Skarstein@Vital.no wrote:
> > 
> > if SpareMiNT was based on Debian you would already have this "installation
> > manager" available with one simple command: apt-get upgrade
> > 
> I can't see why this couldn't be done with rpm as well. In fact, I'm pretty
> sure that I've seen tools (shell-scripts perhaps?) that does exactly this:
> Connect to a rpm repository, compares installed packages with the latest
> releases and let the user upgrade if desired. It would be nice to have a
> GEM-interface though.

Actually, to do it right, you have to put a bit more effort into the whole
mechanism.

"apt-get dist-upgrade" on a Debian system will upgrade your whole system to
the current state - and it will do so in the right order[1] and know about
new packages that are needed by a new version of an upgraded package and
install these, too[2].

Apt is really great - it has successfully upgraded multiple systems here,
going from a.out to elf file format (which means automatically upgrading the
dynamic linker and all libraries), and then to glibc instead of libc5 -
without needing a single reboot during the updates. And you can upgrade
anytime you like - a simple "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" will
fetch and install all known security fixes for your system - no need to know
where to look on what FTP server for patches.

cu
Michael


[1] Example: sendmail requires libdb2. New sendmail requires new version of
libdb2. If you simply upgrade all rpm packages, you may upgrade sendmail
before libdb2, thus having a non-working setup inbetween. The same may
happen if you install the new version too early, so the installer has to be
very careful.

[2] Example: a package like ghostscript is split into a -base and a -x11
package. The installer has to decide that you now need the -x11 package,
too, to get the same functionality that you had before.