will trillich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>i crafted one concerning mostly apt-get, tho it touches on some
>of the dpkg features -- it's at
>
>http://www.eGroups.com/files/newbieDoc/apt-get-intro.html
A few comments on that, some on the content, some typographical. From
reading through it, it's an extremely useful document. Thanks for your
efforts!
* In bash, you need to press tab twice after typing 'apt' to get a
completion listing, possibly even three times if you have the same
set of things as you installed except for aptitude. The reason for
this is that the first tab tries to complete as much unambiguous
text as possible, then stops; if you hadn't had aptitude installed,
this would complete an additional '-', otherwise it would stop
immediately. Any further tabs provide a full listing if and only if
the previous tab stopped immediately without being able to complete
any more.
This is probably a bit much for a packaging howto, though; if it
can't be made more concise than what I've written (I'm wordy, I
admit it), then it's probably too confusing and should be deleted.
"Press tab a couple of times until you get a listing" would be good
enough.
* 'uname -r' gives the version of your *kernel*, not your
distribution. 'cat /etc/debian_version' is the best way to find out
what version of Debian you've got.
* Perhaps add a note about 'testing' to the SETUP section, which
currently only mentions 'stable' and 'unstable'?
* 'apt-get update' is a source of confusion to many people, primarily
because it doesn't update dpkg's available file; hence, commands
like 'dpkg -p' won't work as expected. (apt-cache works fine,
though, of course.) If there's somewhere where it won't impair
readability, it might be worth noting that, if dselect is configured
to use apt, then 'dselect update' does everything that 'apt-get
update' does plus updating dpkg's available file. This might be more
detail than you want to go into, though.
* I'd comment on the differences between 'apt-get upgrade' and
'apt-get dist-upgrade' (the latter will intelligently handle
changing dependencies with new versions of packages), especially as
this is extremely useful for people who don't follow unstable but
who just want to upgrade smoothly from one stable release to the
next.
* Actually, it's dpkg that informs you about changes in configuration
files, not apt - but that's a minor point.
* I don't think that /var/cache/apt/srcpkgcache.bin is used only for
source packages, as you might expect from its name. Rather, I
believe (from my reading of the documentation and the code, though I
don't understand apt fully) that it's used to store the information
fetched from the sources in /etc/apt/sources.list before it's merged
into the main package cache in /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin.
* There's a stray > in the note about packages.debian.org.
* s/istallation/installation/ in the section about dpkg and grep.
* It would be nice to note that libapt-pkg2.7 isn't actually a real
package, but a virtual one provided by apt itself.
* The section on 'dpkg -L' should say that it only works on installed
packages. 'dpkg -c' - or, more fully, 'dpkg-deb -c' - works on .deb
files you've downloaded. Likewise with 'dpkg -S'; the only real
alternative to that for uninstalled packages is the search form at
http://packages.debian.org/, or to download the Contents-$(ARCH).gz
file for the relevant distribution from a Debian mirror.
Thanks,
--
Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
