Hi, On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 03:31:09PM +0200, Michael Schwingen wrote: > On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 12:17:37AM +0200, Guido Flohr wrote: > > 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. > > Thats the problem I have. "Write a wrapper that will do it" is a bit > different from having the feature designed into the system from the > beginning. At least SuSE yast is such a wrapper. Probably linuxconf has more or less the same strategy. > However, I do not see why I would want to do that. apt-get displays in > advance what packages it will upgrade, and with which consequences (ie. > which additional packages are being installed, which are removed etc.), so > why would I ever want to do this manually? Matter of taste. I rather have the operation fail with "package foo requires feature bar" because I know that I wouldn't look at the output of apt after the second time I've done it. > > 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. > > In what way? How many "foreign" (non-Debian packages) are installed on your Debian system? > Debian has the "alien" command which will install tar.gz/rpm/slp archives. My system has the same "alien" command. Sure you can convert from one format to the other. Seems like all package manager have this feature. > Those were just examples - if the system is capable of doing these, it must > be designed the right way. I would not trust a wrapper script with such > tasks. The system is GNU-Linux, not Debian. If you can do it with one package manager, you can principally do it with any package manager that is capable of dependency tracking. > And yes, such an upgrade works just fine in multi-user mode when done right. > Even if you lock out all users and terminate services, I see no need to > actually do a reboot or switch to single-user mode. Emphasis on "when done right". And "if everything is like apt expected it" omitted. No package manager can find out every extension I have applied to my system and what consequences major modifications of the system will have for these extensions. As for the reboot: I'm neither paranoid nor windows-minded, but I want to be sure that my system will reboot properly after a major upgrade, no matter whether that upgrade has been prepared by Debian, RedHat, SuSE or whatever folks. I would even reboot a Debian system after exchanging important shared libraries. To come back to the topic of this list, I think that a successful upgrade of any system (including MiNT) depends much more on the quality of the packages than on the particular package management software used. Dependency tracking has not been invented by Debian. Ciao Guido
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