[Gllug] Debian hopeless

[Ben Fitzgerald]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 12:56:34PM +0000, Doug Winter wrote:
> On Tue 09 Mar Ben Fitzgerald wrote:
> > With Slackware it's +very+ easy to uninstall packages. You just have to
> > know it's not going to impact anything else you need on the box!
> 
> Dependency management makes package installation and removal more
> complex than you might think though.
> 
> How about if that package contains a shared object for apache, so that
> if you remove it your apache will go wrong?  Does it know to edit
> the apache configuration file and restart it before removing the
> package?

Perhaps I should have put some kind of emphasis around the "know" in my
mailing. ( __know__ !)

I agree it's important to know this information. The answer is no, slackware
doesn't know what the impact is. This is left to the administrator. I guess
this comes down in part to how far you take the unix philosophy and what
you as a sysadmin want.

You can put install scripts in to deal with this at package creation time,
though. So once you make a package you can increase it's awareness, but it's
standalone, not integrated into a db like on redhat rpms. Other solutions may
exist for slack but I've not felt the need to use them yet.

Ben
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