I hate apt-get

[Tom Buskey]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:

> On Sun, February 13, 2011 11:06 am, Jeffry Smith wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Lori Nagel <jastiv at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I hate apt-get stuff.
>



>
> I guess the bottom line is, ain't no package management system that's
> perfect (though I know one user on a BBS I belong to who feels pretty
> strongly about Sun's package management).  And, when you break from the
> expected upgrade paths and/or use --force for either of them, you run a
> real risk of Issues(tm).
>
>
Debian seems to have an advantage in that they had apt for dependency
checking early on and a large repository that included what everyone wanted.

RPM was used by multiple distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) with
different sets of dependencies, but not different enough.  Plus many felt
the need to build other repositories that followed different dependencies.
Finally, there were multiple, short lived equivalents to apt.  Anyone
remember Ximian?  We had Mandrake's system I don't remember, SuSE's YaST and
multiple predecessors to yum.

When I ran Mandrake, I often needed a 3rd party rpm to make something work.
Sometimes things broke, but usually not.

Debian has been lucky that Ubuntu has kept to the Debian standard.

As for Sun's system, the 1st rule is that only Sun is allowed to modify
system areas.  3rd party packages stay to /usr/local, /opt or some other
directory that is not part of the OS areas.  Solaris 10 and earlier don't
have an apt/yum solution that will gather up all the dependencies that are
missing.  An install will fail and then you'll have to find out why and go
find it and figure out the right order.  Patches are worse.  As a Solaris
admin, I like the change with Solaris 11, but I'm sad they invented a new
method instead of adopting apt/yum.

Solaris has a huge advantage with its stable API and a disadvantage with
partial patching practices.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20110213/77ab9f36/attachment-0001.html