Subject: Re: adding a hard drive
From: James Dory (jdory@gci.net)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 12:28:11 AKST
Mac Mason wrote:
>...
>
>
>>package and installed some from source, it broke apt because apt was
>>unaware of the additional installations of software. (If I understood).
>>
>>
>...
>
>Um...apt (and emerge, ports, rpm, everything) can only manage the
>packages it has installed; if you install outside the package management
>system, the software will work just fine, but (apt, emerge, etc) won't
>be able to do any of it for you.
>
>
>If somebody managed to explode apt by installing an unrelated piece of
>software from source, they did something really dumb.
>
>~Mac~
>
>
>
Hi Mac,
Just for fun, I went and copied the complete quote so you can draw your
own conclusions - as I obviously don't have any experience with this.
here it is:
"*Robust package management* (Score:5, Insightful)
by dspeyer (531333) <http://slashdot.org/%7Edspeyer> on Tuesday
November 18, @09:32PM (#7507808
<http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86326&cid=7507808>)
(Last Journal: Monday July 07, @05:29PM
<http://slashdot.org/%7Edspeyer/journal/>)
I used Debian a while back, and I didn't find apt to be a complete
solution to my dependancy needs. It wasn't long before I found myself
needing things outside of the apt repository -- even in the dependancy
lists of packages inside it! It was probably some sort of temporary
error or delay, but I wasn't going to wait around. I went to the project
pages, and upgraded manually.
The problem came when I tried to go back, and use apt again. The entire
apt system maintained its own list of installed packages with no
awareness of what was actually on the system, so as soon as it fell out
of sink, the entire apt manageer collapsed. My experience on Redhat and
Mandrake were similar.
It doesn't have to be like this! It is possible to find out what's on a
system. Does a package require python>=2.1? Parse python -V and get an
answer you can trust. Do you need a library, get its version with
for i in `cat /etc/ld.so.conf` /lib /usr/lib;do ls $i// *libraryName*
/.so*;done 2>/dev/null | grep -v @ | sed 's/.*\.so\.//g' | sed 's/\*//g'
There's nothing about your system that /can't/ be tracked down by a
little intelligent scriptwork. If package managers worked like that,
then you'd be able to ignore them on occasion or even break small pieces
and the rest wouldn't come tumbling down.
Is anybody working on this? Is anybody /interested/ in working on this?
"
cheers, jim
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