[KLUG Members] Package Manager Problems

[Peter Buxton]

Says Jamie McCarthy <jamie@mccarthy.vg>:

> Happy Thanksgiving!  Today I'm thankful for Debian's "apt" :)

So am I. Hmmm... I never tried Synaptic.

> To do a system-wide update of all installed packages (notably, to
> catch up with all security updates):
> 
>     apt-get dist-upgrade

Hmmm....

I do three things when I update:

dselect update ; dselect select ; apt-get dselect-upgrade

The first goes to a list of, usually, http/ftp sites, grabs the latest
package listings thence, and enters them into an availability listing on
your machine. The second cranks up dselect in package selection mode.
Even if I don't add or subtract packages, I press return: this checks
your current package selections and makes sure all dependencies are
acceptable. I use both testing and unstable on various machines, and
both see dependencies change over the lifetime of a package. Thus, it's
nice to see any changes it makes.

The last performs the package updates according to my dselect decisions.
Packages can be added, removed, updated or put on hold.

> The security benefit is huge.

Absolutely. As long as I keep up on updates, I don't have known bugs
hanging around. Unstable has the security fixes in naturally, but all
such fixes are backported to testing and stable.

> There's also "unstable" for those who want the very latest versions of
> everything, but it sometimes does break, and a couple times a year it
> will break badly enough to require some manual poking around by
> someone who knows what they're doing, to get apt back on its feet.

Heh. Apt/dpkg/dselect never quite broke for me, but I have had to
massage my unstable home server past some traumatic upgrades. ;-) They
broke bonobo/gnome-session just last week for a couple days. I had to
use Metacity without a session manager... which worked fine.

> There's Progeny but it's defunct, not sure if there is a user
> community.

Progeny is rolling custom Linux installs (Debian-based) for corporate
customers--they've moved from mass retail to custom work, in other
words. Go them.


Says "Robert G. Brown" <bob@acm.org>...

> Jamie, I'd like to know how apt handles some critical updates, like
> the Kernel itself, or a ciritcal library like libc/glibc. Are there
> updates that require a reboot, or is this handled in some particularly
> clever way?

I believe apt installs the kernel and lets you, or asks you to, reboot.

The libc6.postinst script re-execs init and has a list of services that,
if they are installed, will be restarted. It also displays the message:
"If other services begin to fail mysteriously after this upgrade, it may
be necessary to restart them too." :-)

Most upgrades are handled very well. (They invented the Pre-depends
relationship after depends proved to be too coarse to automatically
handle the upgrade from libc5 to libc6.) Generally speaking, as long as
you follow the packaging rules, you shouldn't have to worry about
upgrades. GNOME->GNOME2, KDE2->KDE3... the biggest gripe is the user 
demand for creating super-unstable Debians... for a while, I was d/l X
4.2.x from Branden Robinson's home directory.



Says Bruce Smith <bruce@armintl.com>...

> It appeared the CD had the files in the wrong directory, but I'm not
> sure.

Believe it or not, it probably did. The way apt creates 'pointers' to
stored packages is rather confusing. Whenever I change a source or add
one I can count on fiddling with the line in /etc/apt/sources.list.

> And it seems like the XFree86 setup didn't work either.

I have a friend who, even using the GUI tools, has nearly burned his
monitor out trying to get X working on Debian after multiple tries. (Big
games freak... I bet he hung himself on his latest-and-greatest
hardware.) I was never there to do it with him, and he never figured out
what kept biting him back, so... probably just the standard
"Damn-X-is-a-bitch-to-install-by-hand Blues."

Mandrake, OTOH, worked fine. <shrug>

> > I am still confused why Redhat doesn't provide a up2date channel
> > with newer pacakges. Offering newer revs of Mozilla, Evolution and
> > Gnome would rock. 
>
> My only guess is Redhat wants to sell CD's of their new releases.

Understandable. Maybe now that a member of Software in the Public
Interest resigned, citing lack of commitment on others' parts, we'll get
some easier ways to contribute to Debian (I particularly favor Paypal).

> OTOH, Ximian's red-carpet does provide updates to Evolution and other
> Gnome packages for Redhat and other distributions.  Very nice, but a
> pain if you try to "upgrade" from one Redhat release to a newer one.

Never a problem with Debian. JUST REMEMBER to to keep an eye on the
Debian Way... i.e., make sure you maintain your system the way they plan
to. For instance, /etc/default/ has recently come into vogue on
Debian...  scripts in /etc/init.d/ source these "POSIX shell fragments"
(which are mostly configuration variables).

I'm not sure how well Ximian<->Debian coordinate their efforts so can't
comment on trying to support the two.

-- 
for gpg key: http://killdevil.org/~peter
So you had better do as you are told
You better listen to the radio. -- E.Costello, 1977