Re: apt-get

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     Lets just call it a 'lively debate'.  apt-get may not be perfect (and
>     keep in mind that what I am considering is using the framework, not
>     using Debian's packages).  But apt-get is certainly a whole lot better
>     then the FreeBSD ports system.
>
>     I think we know that what we want is 'apt-get-like'.  Not necessarily
>     apt-get itself, but something that works along the same lines.  

May i add some things to the debate? Apt-get is not the whole story in 
the Debian system, the real low level tool is dpkg, and you can 
stipulate that packages are "hold" and will not be upgraded. However
playing with this feature needs to use dselect or aptitude, and is 
particularly newbie unfriendly. Another feature of Debian system that
is very interesting is that you can specify some sorts of 
metadependencies such as for example a MTA dependency. This dependency 
will be fulfilled if you install sendmail, exim, postfix, etc. and is 
required by other packages. This is a very nice feature. I don't want to 
say that Debian doesn't offer nice features. Simply that some of these 
features require a lot of sophistication from the user, and that life is 
not always as simple as apt-get install somestuff. My own experience is 
that is is ways easier to install new packages under FreeBSD that under
Debian stable, but of course this may be ascribed to lack of ingeniosity
on my part. Let me add that i am not alone sharing this opinion, and
that basically all my colleagues have found far more trouble than 
pleasure with this distribution, and they are not particularly mentally 
impaired, at least they all have their phd since a long time.