Tony Finch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Rajappa Iyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >1. It does a terrible job at tracking dependencies, IMHO. If you
> > install packages A, B and C at the same time and A depends on C,
> > it's not smart enough to install C first. pkg_order | tsort should
> > do the job, one would presume.
> >
> >2. It does an even more terrible job at fetching dependencies. Try
> > installing a complex set of programs and files (e.g. gnome) and see
> > how many individual components you have to fetch. Contrast with
> > "cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome; make install".
>
> Both of those are handled by the apt-get program, and were in the past
> handled by dselect (but dselect is horrid for a whole load of other
> reasons).
apt-get does a better job at collections, true, but in my experience
still does not do a proper package ordering before installation. And
if component packages have inconsistent dependencies, apt-get puts
your system in a state that is hard to recover from. I've had both of
these things happen to me while installing gnome. Now one can argue
that this reflects a problem with the individual package rather than
the infrastructure, but I feel that if a package manager deals with a
bundle in a manner similar to a package, it should deal with
consistency issues of the component packages.
Don't get me wrong. I think that the problem that Debian package
manager is trying to solve is not an easy one to solve in a completely
bulletproof manner and I don't have a solution to offer offhand,
either. apt-get is undoubtedly an improvement on dselect, but I think
it builds on a fundamentally shaky infrastructure, IMHO. My gut
feeling is that one would be better off building a super-duper package
management system on top of the ports mechanism and extending the
existing pkg_* tools.
Regards,
Rajappa
--
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a.k.a. Rajappa Iyer. New York, New York.
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