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On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 22:32, Rainer Mager wrote:
> David (and all),
>
> Thanks for the reply. The part about mixing hand built stuff with
> pacages
> in concerning as I do this quite often. The number of available packages is
> encouraging but, nonetheless, I know occasions will arise. I've had to
> build/install by hand X, glibc, postgres, the kernel, gcc, freeamp, and
> others because of needing bleeding edge versions that fix bugs or because,
> in debugging the current version, I needed a non-stripped binary.
dpkg doesn't like you having things on your machine that it doesn't know
about, especially if other things depend on those packages.
HOWEVER, practically everything is available in debian, and all it takes is a
apt-get source xfrisk (or whatever). Then when you compile the package, you
will end up with a .deb which the packaging system will be able to work with.
Oh, and if something isn't available in debian there are tools that will
compile it into a package automatically. I turn everything I run into a
debian package, just in case I want to uninstall it later. The only hassle
is dealing with upstream releases of the package (I have to backport my
changes).
BTW, this isn't debian specific, I'd say you could do the same thing with
RPM. It would probably just be harder :-)
As for bleeding edge, I rarely hear a upgrade/bugfix has been made before it
installs automatically on my unstable box. Unlike redhat, updates are a
critical part of debian and releases are almost irrelevant (I wouldn't be
surprised if they get eliminated if someone works out a smart way of
perculating testing into stable, except I guess it would reduce publicity).
> Although the automatic installation abilities of apt sound nice, I find
> that I usually want to actually download the, in my case, RPM so that I can
> use it on multiple machines. That is, I question the benefit of this for
> me.
Beleive me, it will be beneficial. E.g.:
You can remove software that you're not likely to use for another
month, because you know within a minute you can have it
downloaded and installed again. This makes your more secure, more
stable,
and frees up heaps of disk space.
Say you want to try out ddd. You just have to type apt-get install ddd
and all of ddd's dependencies will get magically resolved. You don't
have to know that ddd now depends on openmotif in advance, apt
will figure this out and install openmotif for you. Debian is _great_
for
trying things out.
As I have already mentioned, apt-get dist-upgrade will keep your
computer running the latest and greatest with no effort required.
Except
to fix things breaking, which means you can't run upgrades about
quarter of
the time, but if you've ever tried to keep up with a big app in CVS
you'll
know all about that :-)
Oh, and there are a good half a dozen utilities to allow you to use packages
on multiple machines with only one download, apt-proxy to apt-move spring to
mind immediatly.
So quick summary... bypassing the packaging system leads to 'bad things', but
it is relativly easy to compile and install as many programs as you like
without stepping outside the packaging system.
Corrin
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