[Gllug] Installing Stuff?

[Jim Bailey]

Hi,

to paraphrase the Mutt guy all package management systems suck even my 
beloved Debian's dpkg, dselect, apt-get stuff.  I tend to use them to get 
the basics and simple cmd line tools such as lsof if you want control and 
to do things properly source code and compile time flags I found it not 
that difficult after the first couple of times and often it is the only 
way to get packages to interact the way you want.

Peace Jim

On Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 10:22 AM, Ian Scott wrote:

> A word of warning on the distro's rpm package manager "programs" (eg. 
> YaST,
> rpmdrake, etc).
>
> A big problem with these is that you don't necessarily know what they
> are doing.  They may well resolve dependancies automatically, but they
> may also just install rpms, and ignore dependancies!
>
> I learnt to my cost that YaST does this - it happily sorts out SuSE
> dependancies, but if you try to use it to install other rpms, it will
> just install them and ignore dependancies!!!  I learnt this when I
> tried to install a load of Mandrake rpms on to my SuSE 6.4 system, and
> managed to trash my box, because it overwrote a load of system stuff.
> Ooops.  I did manage to recover it, but I had to boot off the CD and
> forcefully reinstall the base SuSE packages!
>
> I now use the commandline, so I know when I'm overwriting stuff.
>
> Incidently, if you know you want to install even though you haven't
> got all the dependancies (eg. missing some doc packages), use the
> --nodeps option.
>
> If you want to install cross-distro rpms, you might also find they
> won't install because they will overwrite files.  To force an install,
> you can use --replacefiles - but backing up the replaced files first
> is probably a good idea!
>
> Having flamed it, YaST is useful, because it will install lots of rpms
> at once - but you need to be careful you know what it's doing.
>
> NB. This refers to yast1.  Yast 2 may be better.
>
>
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