Re: apt-get

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> Michel Talon wrote:
>
> I've been keeping my debian (originally knoppix) system up
> to date for a year now with apt-get, there has never been the
> slightest problem.  Even if I interrupt the process in the middle, it
> recognises that and cleans up next time.  It's amazingly good stuff.

Well, one of my collegues has lost KDE doing that with Knoppix.
You have been happy to upgrade at the right time.

> What problems are these?  I know of only one problem with portupgrade,
> the disruptive library upgrade (eg, bump up gettext to an incompatible
> version and you have to upgrade 80% of your ports).  The problem is
> compounded in portupgrade by the fact that most ports end up being
> compiled from source (because up-to-date binary packages don't exist).

Exactly, i have been bitten by gettext three times. I always keep an old 
copy handy. Install something and the process ends up recompiling 100 
ports, and be happy if it finishes without encountering a port that 
doesn't compile. This problem is exactly the same with Debian stable 
(which i run at work). You *never* find the binary package for the 
interesting program you want to try. The binary packages you find are 
always for unstable, when they exist. You end up compiling from source 
after having created a Debian directory with tools which sort of work, 
and almost always require a lot of manual tweaking.


> This problem exists in Debian but is mitigated by two things: (1) it's
> based on binary packages, so it doesn't take all that long; and 
> (2) they have a three-tier system of unstable -> testing -> stable, 
> where packages move "downhill" to "testing" only after stabilising a bit 
> and only when they won't be disruptive to existing packages, and the 
> entire "testing" system becomes "stable" when it, well, stabilises. 
> This would be overkill for DragonFly, and the VFS idea (maintaining
> multiple versions on the same system) will solve this problem much
> more cleanly.

Yes this wonderful mechanism ensures that the so called stable system is 
3 years old, the unstable sytem periodically bombs out, and the testing 
system is not much better.  Add to that the perpetual politics nightmare 
that the Debian people are so fond of, and you get the present fiasco
of the "Sarge release" delayed because it is not free enough ...


> Rahul