On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 04:22:09PM -0400, Brian van den Broek wrote: > On 6 August 2012 10:23, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <[email protected]> wrote: > > > As for aptitude... Well, using aptitude is dangerous at this point > > anyway. On Debian systems, aptitude doesn't know about multiarch (or > > at least, didn't last time I checked),
As I read it, and I may be out of date, Debian is reorganising their distro for multiarch, but they are not quite there yet. I upgrade my testing system(s) approximately weekly and I've had no problems, though libraries seem to be migrating to new locations. Occasionally I have difficultiess with libraries that I have to install from source coode because they haven't been packaged by Debian yet, and they don't know where to find other libraries they need, but that's really not a problem with aptitude; aptitude has nothing to do with that. > > so it's not recommended to use > > it for things like installing flash and whatnot. And once you've > > installed flash on your system at all, then all bets are off with what > > might happen on future package installs or upgrades. > > I've been reading around the debian documents and they suggest > aptitude is the recommended choice for update wrangling for debian > installs. So, now I am confused :-) I used aptitude for upgrades from one release to the next even when they were recommending apt a few years ago. I've even used it once in a chroot so I could go on running my server while upgrading a copy of the system. The only problems I've ever run into were running out of disk space during the install, and a few packages whose configuration required already running on a new kernel (that was in the chroot, which had a new kernel but was still using the old one). But they configured themselves just fine when I booted into the new system. In the current upgrade from stable to the new stable (now testing) they seem to be worried about incompatibility betwen udev and the kernel during the upgrade. But they are not worried about aptitude. I've always thought that the scripts for initializing udev should reside in the same space in the file system as the kernel modules, so they that they'd be nicely paired off. But that's not the way they're doing it. But aptitude has never been a problem. Once for a major release upgrade they asked me to upgrade aptitude first, and then use the new aptitude to upgrade the rest of the system, but that's the only problem I've ever seen that's due to aptitude. > > Sorry. I teach at Dawson. Classes start soonish. Once they do, I'll > have less time to spend poking and tweaking. I figured you were a teacher rather early in the discussion. Are you affected by the August resumption of last years classes because of the strikes? My son went through Dawson, but not in comp sci. A few weeks ago he suddenly asked me what he should do if he wanted to learn programming. I suggested he start with the book 'how to design programs', because that teaches how to think about programming, using Scheme, a relatively easy language to work with but one that's still good enough for real applications. If nothing else that'll teach him whether programming is really what he wants to do. And there's some evidence that if one is learning a conventional (and in my mind obsolete) language like C you do better if you've spent a few weeks learning Scheme first. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
