On April 11, 2004 11:00 pm, you wrote:

Sergei Klink writes:

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On April 11, 2004 05:34 pm, Darrell Shively wrote:

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Hi all:

I've just finished my long term evaluation of Linuxes for AMD64 and Suse 9.0 won*. When I went to the Suse web site to but a copy I was surprised to find that Suse 9.1 will be available next month.

Now I have 2 questions:

1. Should I get Personal or Professional? The descriptions imply that the x86_64 stuff is only in professional.

2. Whichever I get, will I be able to upgrade my installation in place or will I have to reinstall? I'm pretty sure in-place upgrading is supported but I didn't see that explicitly stated anywhere. Or I overlooked it.

A little OT, but I'd be hoping to be able to upgrade it with apt next time...

apt cannot do all the things that rpm can do. Especially package renaming and splitting is difficult to do with apt...

Erm... What do you mean?? Apt is just for managing lists of packages, rpm has a bit different purpose, doesn't it? (especially since I use both at the same time with SuSE?)

On April 12, 2004 10:50 pm, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

Sergei Klink writes:

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Erm... What do you mean?? Apt is just for managing lists of packages, rpm has a bit different purpose, doesn't it? (especially since I use both at the same time with SuSE?)

I meant YaST not rpm.

If you do an update from 9.0 to 9.1, YaST knows about package splits and renames and will do the right thing.

I see about renames, but.. splits? Could you make an example? Do you mean when a package "things" providing "thing1" and "thing2" gets split into 2 packages, and the packages that were made dependant on "things" are automatically made dependant on "things1" and "things2" in the database? Hm.

Btw. what is so great about apt that you love it?

Simple and a bit faster loading than YaST :), command-line ("apt-get install foo" kind of thing) control, easy to manage repositories. That's about enough, I think. I haven't done any upgrades yet(I've switched to SuSE from Debian - I had my reasons, _not_ "user-friendliness" or anything like that...), so we'll see about that :) Besides, I just like aptitude... a lot... just because :)

On April 12, 2004 11:29 pm, you wrote:

Sergei Klink writes:

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On April 12, 2004 10:50 pm, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

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Sergei Klink writes:

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Erm... What do you mean?? Apt is just for managing lists of packages, rpm has a bit different purpose, doesn't it? (especially since I use both at the same time with SuSE?)

I meant YaST not rpm.

If you do an update from 9.0 to 9.1, YaST knows about package splits and renames and will do the right thing.

I see about renames, but.. splits? Could you make an example? Do you mean when a package "things" providing "thing1" and "thing2" gets split into 2 packages, and the packages that were made dependant on "things" are automatically made dependant on "things1" and "things2" in the database? Hm.

No, a package providing "onlyonething" is split into two packages and only one of them provides "onlyonething". The other package is often not needed but since you had it before in the system, you might want to have it again.

I'm not sure, it's certainly possible in Debian, when a package can obsolete another one(the rest should be handled by standard dependencies), but I still suspect this is possible when using rpm instead of dpkg as well...Too late to look at it today, though, I need some sleep now :)

On April 13, 2004 06:24 am, Örn Hansen wrote:

tisdag 13 april 2004 07:29 skrev Andreas Jaeger:

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that :) Besides, I just like aptitude... a lot... just because :)

I see.

I can't stand apt ... it's dependancies are dumb.

Apt does not provide those dependencies, package maintainers do. It is a bit peculiar with rpm, you can still tell that dpkg is far more suited for use with apt than rpm :)

An example, is that I had one package wich violated the rules, apt suggested I remove the entire system and then install only a few. I end up having to do things manually with apt anyways.

Minor point - if you're doing it with apt, you're probably not doing it manually :P - using rpm directly would be something I'd consider as "manual".

For me, it's just a gateway to a simple way of getting the newest packages, like KDE ... as SuSE stops providing updates after a while, and creating 3rd party repositories for YaST isn't as open (or wasn't) as it is with apt.

My 2¢ worth ...

No offense, but this is quite a non-informative example, if example at all... As far as I can tell, that's your inappropriate config, not apt's fault, and you're apparently trying to install something like glibc :) (hmm, aren't you talking about that strange glibc upgrade that's in the repositories now). Hold is your friend :) And I'm pretty sure that apt does not mark certain packages for removal by default, even with rpm, even when there's something else that's conflicting being installed anyways, meaning that you probably tried to remove some of important installed ones... So it's just a matter of understanding the way apt works... No one forces you to use it everytime though, anyways :) - that package might be easier to force to install in YaST, if you don't want to read man apt-get before that, but there isn't much apt/YaST can(or should, IMHO) do about existing rpm dependencies...

On April 14, 2004 07:26 am, Örn Hansen wrote:

onsdag 14 april 2004 04:23 skrev Sergei Klink:

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Minor point - if you're doing it with apt, you're probably not doing it manually :P - using rpm directly would be something I'd consider as "manual".

That is exactly what I was referring to ... in majority of situations, I end up with having to use rpm manually. Only after I've made sure dependancies are good enough, can I use apt ... and then, it's only to install one package, or most two. If I want to select packages, I want to use some GUI tool, like YaST, where synaptic would be the tool to use with apt. Alas, now that I got a x86_64 system, I no longer have synaptic :-) ...

I'm pretty sure I had 64bit synaptic compiled and running... I think I've simply rebuilt the source rpm.

On April 14, 2004 07:31 am, Örn Hansen wrote:

onsdag 14 april 2004 04:23 skrev Sergei Klink:

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No offense, but this is quite a non-informative example, if example at all... As far as I can tell, that's your inappropriate config, not apt's fault, and you're apparently trying to install something like glibc :)

Sorry, the offending package was:

z600cups

Which is created for RedHat and depends on cups >= 1:1.1.15 but I have 1.1.19 installed. YaST figures this out easily, but apt doesn't ...

I'm not even sure whether this is the way YaST should behave. I'm not very familiar with packaging, but just ignoring epoch numbers does not sound like a good thing. I suspect that this is the wanted behavior of apt(it compares 0:1.1.19 and 1:1.1.15, and obviously chooses the higher epoch number as higher version). If you'd be really wishing to use apt, pinning is IMHO the best workaround here(check your mail archives for the links, please ;-), but this is the sign that you're probably using packages that you shouldn't be ;) Out of curiosity, did the drivers work?.. So I'm pretty sure this doesn't qualify as an example.

Another problem with apt, is the new x86_64 library packages. It complained about a few of the libraries not being there, when they were and YaST had no problem with those dependancies.

Example? Sounds like you're saying that the apt repository doesn't contain all the packages you need, at most(though I haven't yet seen any missing libraries in x86_64 that some packages would be dependent upon). It seems to me almost every(if not all) package included with SuSE is available in some repository on gwdg.de, if there's something missing, and a dependency still points to it, it's a bug you should probably report, but it has nothing to do with apt(or YaST) (remember also that there could be two libraries of the same name, still seen as different provides) Btw, just FYI, the installation will also "break" if you have unsigned packages... P.S. To put this all together, if you have to go to /var/cache/apt/archives to run rpm -Uvh *.rpm manually, and it works, then really, apt has pretty much done its job already :) After downloading/checking signatures(which is where it often stops due to the lack of such with the default config), the only thing left for apt to do is to pass the packages to rpm to install...

tisdag 13 april 2004 06:50 skrev Andreas Jaeger:

If you do an update from 9.0 to 9.1, YaST knows about package splits and renames and will do the right thing.

Btw. what is so great about apt that you love it?

The only thing good about apt, is that through it you get access to repositories that provide newer and fresher packages, which you otherwise don't get access to with YaST. Like gwdg.de ... YaST is superior to apt, no doubt ... and if I could easily build my own repository and publish it, and make it work with YaST it would make YaST an even greater tool ...

Andreas