On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 09:08:46PM +0200, Michael Schwingen wrote: > On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 10:39:35AM +0200, Jo-Even.Skarstein@Vital.no wrote: > 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]. RPM can do the same, provided that the packages are properly built. Write a wrapper that figures out the correct order for the installation (maybe rpm will already do that, not sure), and then install all packages in one go, that's it. I personally dislike the Debian way of doing upgrades because for my taste it does too many things automagically behind my back. With rpm I can do just the same but with exact control about the upgrade process. I collect all packages I want to upgrade, try "rpm -Uvh [RPMs]" until rpm is satisfied and then upgrade exactly the packages I want (or cheat with /etc/rpmrc resp. --nodeps/--force). Another advantage of rpm is its ability to easily integrate foreign packages whereas systems like Debian or (Free|Net|Open)BSD are somewhat "closed" in that respect. Just a matter of taste. Both Debian and the BSD systems are certainly high quality distributions. But rpm is not necessarily inferior just because the Debian folks managed to upgrade from a.out to ELF without a reboot ages ago. If a libc upgrade in a multi-user runlevel is reasonable on a production system is also debatable ... As for the other features: A script that automatically informs you about available updates from an RPM repository is really trivial to write. I think I have uploaded one to the Sparemint server some time ago. Ciao Guido
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