->> If Richard Bos doesn't stop advocating alpha-grade software for use by newbies ->> I'm going to get seriously pissed off Well, most of this issue is that people who don't RTFM are using this software. It's also a problem of people not knowing how this software works. If one is going to use something like apt which is correctly discribed as 3rd party, not supported software then they should understand what it's doing. They should go to the apt4rpm site and read about what they are using. This isn't case where one can get away with letting the VCR clock blink or something of that nature. I ran into a simular situation lastnight where apt wanted to upgrade the gimp-devel and gimp-help RPM's to the 1.3.9 pkgs from usr-local-bin, but it held back the gimp package. If the devel pkg was replaced I couldn't very well compile plugins and other such things. Apt told me it was going to upgrade these pkgs before it did it. So what did I do. I went into /etc/apt/apt.conf and put a hold on those two pkgs so that apt would ignore them when it upgraded the system. These were not critical updates so it's unlikely that SuSE will put out new pkgs unless there is a security flaw in them and then in that case it will be announced that there are Gimp updates on the SuSE Announce list. I will then go upgrade them myself...or run YOU which works fine with apt. It's simply a matter of people looking at the output of the software is giving them. And if they have a problem they can always send an email to this list or the apt lists if they can't look up the answer in the documentation. People tend to just trust the software they use to be smart enough to do what it should. This is absolutely not the case. Software is created by humans and therefore it will be flawed. People need to pay attention to what they are doing... this stuff isn't that hard and if they don't want to know what's going on then they should stick with the point and clicky tools that they are given that SuSE will support. If YaST2 is boinked then they can actually complain to SuSE about it. Apt isn't supported so a little more vigilence is need to understand WTF is going on. Also, I would say that calling apt alpha software is way off base. It's just requires a bit more reading and understanding of what is going on the some of the point and clicky software does. And Synaptic isn't in the point and clicky catagory because it's just a GUI to the program itself..it can't do anymore then the CLI version really can. Apt works just fine..but people need to pay attention and have some idea of what's going on in order to use it. I really wish SuSE had not reinvented the wheel with 8.1's YOU..and would have just written an YaST2 module that used apt..and that they would have contributed to apt which was already out there. But then again that's very typical.."If it's not written in house..it's crap." /end rant.. -- Ben Rosenberg ---===---===---===--- mailto:ben@whack.org Tell me what you believe.. I tell you what you should see.