Author: john lewis Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Dependency hell (Was: Re: Xorg is hungry today...)
On Mon, 5 Oct 2009 19:56:15 +0100
Samuel Penn <sam@???> wrote:
> On Monday 05 October 2009 18:21:56 john lewis wrote:
> > However I would like to say that one of the reasons I use Debian is
> > that I haven't needed to reinstall* it since I put that first system
> > on a PC ten years or so ago. I have just moved seamlessly from one
> > year to the next with daily apt-get update (nowadays the update bit
> > is taken care by cron-apt) and apt-get upgrade (nowadays aptitude
> > safe-upgrade)
>
> Gentoo is similar, except that the 'apt-get upgrade' bit is seen as
> an unnecessary step, and they've managed to pretty much remove the
> concept of versioning above the level of individual packages.
I didn't really make it clear that "aptitude update" only updates the
available package listing held on the local computer.
Using cron-apt, as I have configured it, updates my local list _and_
downloads any updated packages overnight.
'aptitude safe-upgrade' will check those package lists, recognise
that there are updated packages already available on the system and
carry out the neccessary steps to install them.
If those packages had not been downloaded by cron-apt the
safe-upgrade command would get the packages from the relevant
repositories as well, provided the aptitude update command had
preceeded it.
> Again, you don't have a 'testing version of Gentoo', stable/unstable
> labels are applied at the level of an individual package version, not
> the system level.
this is of course part of the the Debian Philosophy.
The stable distro rarely gets any updates other than essential security
fixes and in the past it has meant stable soon became 'out of date'
Unstable is where packages go to be tested for a short time (sometimes,
but not always I think, via experimental). Packages that get through
this phase, ie aren't "full of bugs", move to testing for more
intensive testing by users.
In due course packages in testing become relatively bug free and
testing becomes the new stable and the cycle starts over again.
For most of the time I have been using Debian I have run an
unstable aka sid installation. It has proved most of the time to be
anything but unstable, Only major changes to things like X cause
problems, sometimes! But I think it needs to be updated daily and an
eye kept on what is happening during those daily updates.
If I ever need to install Debian on a spare box I would normally
install only a very basic system, one that it is capable of booting to
a command line.
I then do a dist-upgrade on that basic setup to convert it to a sid
system before installing the bulk of the packages needed for a working
system. I have gone from stable to sid in one step but it isn't a good
idea.
These days a netinstall.iso is available for testing and it was one
of these I used when converting my acer netbook from whatever system was
on it to Debian. I don't do an update/safe-upgrade cycle on it
frequently enough so sometimes find it downloading 100-150 packages
when I do.
On the other hand the stable version of Debian on my geneweb "database
server" hasn't had an updated package for weeks.
My apologies if this is boring for the old hands but there may be
newcomers on the list who wonder why we do the things we do and why we
chose one distro in preference to another.
