Re: Easy Installs

[Ian Main <imain@netidea.com>]

On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:31:30PM -0400, David Kane-Parry wrote:
> Christopher R. Hertel <crh@nts.umn.edu> wrote:
> >Urq.  I've had nothing but trouble with RPM.  I like Debian's system, but 
> >I think we could do the same sort of thing with the PKG utility and not 
> >have to mess with these other systems.
> 
> When did tarballs and autoconf become not enough?

Just for the sake of sharing ideas, I'm going to tell you a bit about my
experience with package managers.  I'm not advocating that OpenBSD move this
way, I'll leave that up to the people who are actually doing the work.. my
goal here is just to pitch in my 2c and share my experiences with them.

First off I'd say by themselves they are not that much of a benifit compared
to the ports system.  rpm especially drives me crazy.. you end up with a
pile of dependancies where you end up having to hunt down a zillion packages
and installing them all by hand.. in the end it may save a bit of
(compiling) time, but not that much.  I prefer the 'ports' to this (and I
like compiling stuff too :) ).

Debian's system OTOH, I really do like.  'apt' is what makes it useful
though.. simply because it deals with all the dependancies and locating and
grabbing the necessary packages.  A few months ago when slink came out, I
upgraded our debian servers in an afternoon with about 5 minutes downtime
per service tops, without rebooting and no real hiccups that I remember.

apt is just a front end to dpkg that deals with locating packages and
dealing with dependancies intelligently.  The idea with apt is:

apt-get install gimp

downloads gimp and all the libraries that it depends on and installs the
whole works for you.. it really is a time saver.  They also have commands to
intelligently remove applications and unused libraries, and to do full system
updates.

I do like ports very much as well though, as they have similar dependancy
handling.. the 2 systems are actually very similar from a high level point
of view, except perhaps a bit more functionality with dpkg/apt.

Anyway, just my 2c.

Ian