Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
>>I prefer Debian for any system that I am going to be maintaining over
>>time because the quality of the packaging has beat every other distro I
>>have used by a large margin.
>
>
> Please clearly define 'quality of packaging' were they the high grade
> nuclear electrons, as opposed to the coal produced electrons?
>
The way the software packages are put together. Not as in plastic and
cardboard, but the .deb or .rpm files themselves.
>
>>Yeah, they have had problems with installation, but you don't need to
>>install as often. I've had to do full reinstalls to upgrade most every
>>other distro (including SuSE 7.2-8.1, I was shocked by that one).
>
>
> Pardon? At worst, I've had to pop in a CD and go through upgrade mode,
> it's definitely not a reinstall.
>
My last SuSE upgrade ended up being a start over affair. I don't know
exactly why, but the normal upgrade routine failed to realize that it
was upgrading and started breaking stuff.
NOTE: _always_ backup your home directories immediately before doing a
major OS upgrade. It is a major lifesaver!
>
>>apt4rpm comes close, but the consistency of rpm package dependencies
>>doesn't seem to be where the deb package dependencies are, and proper
>>dependency management is THE make-or-break proposition for a packaging
>>system.
>
>
> *Please* will someone explain this dependencies issue? People like to
> spout 'dependancy hell', 'dependency consistency' etc. without ever
> providing any meat. It's like a marketing buzzword.
>
I forget that there are relative newbies present, sorry.
Dependencies are the software packages that are required to make the
package you are installing work. For instance Mozilla depends on libgtk
(I think) which depend on X11 which depends on libc. How easy or hard a
package manager is to use depends A LOT on how well it handles these
chains of dependencies. Get something in the wrong order and your
whole installation can end up horked while you have to sort things out
by hand.
There are two parts to dependency management:
1. How good packages are about listing their key dependencies. In my
experience .deb packages are better in this. I don't know why, as
there is no technical reason why they should be.
2. How good the package manager is about handling packages in dependency
order. dselect+apt rocks in this area, though the UI is not what I
would call endearing. Most of the "nice" package management frontends
come up short in this area for me.
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