[Gllug] 2.4.15

[Stig Brautaset]

* David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> spake thus:
> On Friday, 23 Nov 2001, Paul Brazier wrote:
> >>It's a great tool relative to what the RH boys have, but it's pretty
> >>broken by Debian's standards; it was written with a fairly fundamental
> >>misunderstanding of how dpkg works.
> >What is the fundamental misunderstanding in a nutshell?
> 
> There is more than one - IWJ would be happy to rant at you about them
> - but an example of it is that the package system has some information
> about the desired state of a package as well as the actual
> state. Normally this information is changed by the package selection
> front-end (although it can be updated by the low-level tools - at the
> most basic level, if you do 'dpkg --install foo.deb', it marks the
> desired state of 'foo' as 'install' before doing anything else.) In
> the original model, the package selection interface then leaves a lot
> of the work of deciding how exactly to achieve the desired state (not
> just what to install and remove, but what order to do it in) up to
> dpkg.
> 
> However, apt does not typically update the desired state of packages,
> and invokes dpkg telling it precisely what to do. This is awkward
> because it effectively replicates all the code in dpkg which does
> this, only less competently. Furthermore, because the desired state of
> packages is not updated, dpkg cannot gracefully handle situations like
> the one where package A replaces and conflicts with package B. Dpkg
> will handle the installation of A nicely if it can see that B is
> selected for removal; but apt doesn't give it this information.
> Regrettably, the response of the apt programmers to this problem has
> been to invoke dpkg (always) with some of the --force options on,
> which of course can quite seriously fuck your system.
> 
> Apt's a good idea, but it needs looked at by someone who really
> understands dpkg.

Thanks for this info Mr. Damerell, I've hung around several of the
Debian mailinglists for a while now, and this was sort of news to me
anyway. Do you know if aptitude suffers from the same problem? (I don't
like dselect. IMHO it has a very confusing interface, I have never even
managed to leave it without using C-c...) Or maybe I should really start
using dselect (and RTFM?).

Anyway, this only really of importance when installing new packages,
right? I imagine Apt will do just fine when just doing dist-upgrade or
something. 

Regards,
Stig

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