Package Management

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Hutchins
> Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 9:10 AM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Re: Package Management
> 
> 
> On Thursday 18 November 2004 05:39 pm, Brian Densmore wrote:
> 
> > Not that portage isn't a great package management utility.
> > It's far far better than rpm. 
> 
> RPM and Portage are almost completely different tools for 
> very different 
> ...  It would be more realistic to compare Portage 
> to up2date, urpmi, or YaST.
Ok, if you want to get technical, then let me restate.

Not that portage isn't a great package management utility.
It's far far better than up2date, urpmi, YaST, or *any* other
RPM-based package management system. 

But in the end, apt is still better and easier to use. The apt 
learning curve is much smaller than portage. Although I understand
that BSD has what is considered the best. Of course this is all
subjective (for the most part). You like gentoo and portage? More
power to you. You like urpmi? Wonderful. I like apt.

Here are my reasons:
1) It took a half hour to learn everything I need to know
   about apt to be expert and efficient at using it;
2) it took me less than an hour to make, test, debug, and
   install a debian package (it worked and installed and
   was recognized by dpkg and apt), complete with dependency
   handling;
3) it is robust enough to be able to fix broken installs
   without having to trash everything, so far;
4) it requires very little thought to install anything;
5) it doesn't require days to upgrade because everything
   needs to be compiled.

Sure there are a few things that require a bit of work, such as installing
a package not in the official lists. But simply adding the source information
in a text configuration file for a non-authorized debian package and running
'apt-get update && apt-get install <custom package>' installs it, and afterward
running 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' will handle updating all installed
packages including the custom ones.

IMNSHO,
Brian D.