On Monday 05 October 2009 22:57:55 john lewis wrote:
> 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.
Ah, I assumed 'update' updated packages, and 'upgrade' upgraded from
one version of Debian to another. It's that latter (wrong!) interpretation
of upgrade that Gentoo skips.
What does dist-upgrade do? Is that upgrading to a new version of
Debian?
Or what happens when Debian 3.2 becomes Debian 4.0 (random version
numbers chosen, since I don't know what version Debian is currently
at)?
I've tried updating the wiki CommandLineEquivalents page mentioned
in the other half of the thread (someone stuck in a Gentoo column,
so I thought I'd try filling it), but some of the tasks don't make
much sense. The task for 'apt-get dist-upgrade' on that wiki page
is confusing.
> > 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 fixes and in the past it has meant stable soon became 'out of date'
This is an upside or downside of Gentoo depending on your point of view.
There is no backporting of security fixes - you just upgrade to the
latest version of the package. This is a lot simpler as far as maintaining
packages goes, but means you may get functionality changes as well.
Tools such as glsa-check will allow you to just list packages which
need upgrading for security reasons, so you can just upgrade things
that really need it, but the system is designed to be a lot more fluid
that many other distros.
> 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.
Gentoo's philosophy is that this is all you get after the initial
install. Everything else is then installed by hand.
> 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.
Not sure what sid stands for...
> On the other hand the stable version of Debian on my geneweb "database
> server" hasn't had an updated package for weeks.
The dedicated servers I manage have few upgrades. My desktop has a
lot more.
> John Lewis
> using Debian Sid
There's that Sid again. To capitalise or not to capitalise?
--
Be seeing you, http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam. Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@???
