Anthony Wong wrote: > |Oh and by the way, this user interface tends to confuse new users (at least > |it did me) who accidentially install many versions of the same package > |because they arn't aware they should be upgrading it instead. > > Because you already have the Debian way in your mind when you were using > rpm. I remembered that I looked very hard to find out how to upgrade a > .deb in Debian by dpkg when I first switched from Redhat to Debian, but > of course I found nothing because 'dpkg -i' handles both :)
No. I had never used debian when I used rpm. This was um... 4 years ago? 3? something like that. I used redhat first for a year before going to debian and it took about 3 months before I cleared up this confusing point. > |I forget how rpm allows removing of one version of a package while leaving > |another version of it installed. > > IIRC you need to specify the version number as well. Ah, that makes sense. > |What happens if you then remove version foo? I'm not sure, it's been a while > |;-). I can say that rpm doesn't deal with this very well. It either has to > |leave version bar's files around, or delete them, either action leaves the > |installed version foo in an inconsitent state. > > Does rpm really do this? That's very silly... I think so. It has to do one or the other. As I said, it's been years since I had to deal with this.. > BTW, anyone has the feeling that the Debian package management system is > slower than RPM? Is it because the part in manipulating the package > information databsse is not doing as good as RPM does? Debian uses a database consiting of text files, which is slower than rpm's binary database. I think it also uses significantly more memory. -- see shy jo
