Re: [MiNT] OSMD - introduction (fwd)

[Teemu Hukkanen <tjhukkan@fishpool.fi>]

Guido.Flohr@t-online.de (Guido Flohr) writes:

> 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:
> 
> 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).

Before apt, debian upgrades were made similarily, running 'dpkg -iGROEB'
or 'dpkg --install --auto-deconfigure --recursive --selected-only
--skip-same-version --refuse-downgrade' on a directory tree of new
packages. With apt, you don't have to keep manually correcting things as
you had to do with the method above, it resolves conflicts and
dependencies all for you, but I guess that was what you didn't want.

> 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.

A debian "woody" system has 6367 native packages available in debian
proper (this does not include contrib or non-free, even though contrib
is part of the released distibution). This is more than in redhat or
*bsd. Any given piece of free software is more likely to be package in
debian than in redhat. Debian packages are also made to comply to the
same standards and are made by known people, debian developers. Redhat
has lots of packages available in their "contrib" section (which isn't
similar to debian's contrib), the problem with that is that basically
anyone can make a package and upload it to redhat contrib, leading to
rather bad quality of packages in general.

> 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.

I think such beasts already exist. rpmfind comes to mind.