On Friday 03 May 2002 09.39, Richard Bos wrote:
On vrijdag 3 mei 2002 01:48, Stefan Nilsen wrote:
This is not a problem when using SuSE's tools, but apt-get is not SuSE's tool. apt-get is a little too picky to be usable with SuSE. apt-get likes debian better.
Humm, APT is not only officially supported/used by Debian. Conectiva uses it as their installer and updater as well, which is an rpm based distrobution just like SuSE. They even provide a GUI for it, I believe. Why is conectiva able to use APT and SuSE would not???
The difference here is that conectiva and debian *supports* the use of APT. SuSE does not do that today. Thats why i believe APT is not a serious alternative. When, and if, SuSE would support the use of APT, it would be great. If they supported it they would also make sure the packages worked with that tool. Today some SuSE packages cannot be installed with APT.
If SuSE would adopt APT there would be 3 big distributions supporting it. By then APT would become a nice candidate to become part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB).
Super.
And by the time RH, SuSE and others are LSB complaint it would be good to have a non distro specific installer. In that case it would be possible to have APT monitoring non SuSE APT (rpms) repositories as well.
In what way is APT *less* distro specific than RPM? APT only works well in 2 big distributions. RPM works in most distributions... It even does not require dependencies to be correct, because you can always --force --nodeps when installing a package. This cannot be done with apt4rpm. I agree APT is a very nice tool in a perfect world, but the world is not perfect...
or maybe fou4s, with added possibility to add the complete update folders on the ftp, not just the security patches, and a good UI to manually be able to select what updates to install.
Both requests/wishes are already provided by APT. The UI to decide which packages to install is there as well. Just use apt-get -S upgrade, e.g.:
dar:~ # apt-get -S upgrade Processing File Dependencies... Done Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following packages have been kept back k_deflt The following packages can be upgraded: mozilla from 0.9.9-9 to 1.0rc1-0 Importance: ? Date: ? xf86tools from 0.1-146 to 0.1-233 Importance: ? Date: ?
Now use "apt-get install mozilla".
I don't call that a good ui :-) Btw, when I try to install java2 I get # apt-get install java2 ..... java2: Depends: libodbc.so but it is not installable Depends: libodbcinst.so but it is not installable ..... And it wants me to fix problems like this by removing all packages with broken dependencies. That does not cut it for me. I need java2 on my machine. Because of problems like this I cannot use APT today. Lets hope SuSE corrects failing packages so that we can begin to fully use this tool also on SuSE. /Stefan