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Re: [MiNT] OSMD - introduction (fwd)



On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 12:37:57AM +0200, Guido Flohr wrote:
> At least SuSE yast is such a wrapper.  Probably linuxconf has more or less
> the same strategy.

yast is one of the reasons I dislike Suse. It is not even capable to browse
a list of avaliable packages without first inserting the CD, let alone do an
automatic security upgrade.

> How many "foreign" (non-Debian packages) are installed on your
> Debian system?

I would guess some 10 - I have some multimedia packages, plus the whole
MontaVista HHL runtime for MPC860 CPUs installed.

> 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.

So in what respect is rpm "more open"?

> 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.

The system is Debian GNU/Linux.

The question is not if the package manager is in principle capable of doing
it. What matters is if the packaging system as provided (or maybe with
readily available, add-on scripts) will do the job. apt has proven several
times that it is up to this task.

> 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.

Of course. It will work as long as your modifications do not touch stuff
that come prepackaged with the distribution - if you modify your shared
libraries without telling apt/dpkg, you ask for trouble.

> 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.

Correct - *after*, and probably not immediately after the upgrade but at a
convenient time.

> 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.

No. But the have it working out of the box on their distribution.

cu
Michael