Re: Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

at bottom :-

On 30/08/2017, Colin Watson  wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 11:26:55PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
>> I was under the impression that due to rpm brokeness Debian and
>> thereafter dpkg came into being.
>
> This is entirely wrong.  The first entry in dpkg's changelog was in
> 1994, and rpm's first release was in 1997.
>
> Please spend at least a little time doing research before asking
> questions of a widely-read mailing list; establishing those dates took
> less than a minute (tail of dpkg's debian/changelog, and looking at
> RPM's Wikipedia page).
>

Dear Colin,

Thank you for pointing out the error of my ways. You are right. It
probably had to do more with the fact/bias that I came/used Debian
much later than I used various rpm distributions. I did see rpm
upgrade, downgrade was broken for a long time in a string of various
rpm-based distributions which later lead me to Ubuntu and then finally
to Debian.

Sorry for the noise.



>
> --
> Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]
>


-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A  2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8

Re: Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 11:26:55PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> I was under the impression that due to rpm brokeness Debian and
> thereafter dpkg came into being.

This is entirely wrong.  The first entry in dpkg's changelog was in
1994, and rpm's first release was in 1997.

Please spend at least a little time doing research before asking
questions of a widely-read mailing list; establishing those dates took
less than a minute (tail of dpkg's debian/changelog, and looking at
RPM's Wikipedia page).

> Could or does somebody remember what discussions took place when dpkg
> was being put up as an ideal package manager. It still is, in case of
> breakage or something goes wrong and the other tools can't fix.

dpkg was written as part of developing Debian and was an integral part
of that development.  It wasn't a matter of looking around for an
existing system to use.

If you want to look at the history of discussions, you're welcome to
look at Debian's mailing list archives; most of the early stuff will be
on debian-devel (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/).

-- 
Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]

Re: Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2017-08-29 23:26:55 +0530 (+0530), shirish शिरीष wrote:
[...]
> From the wikipedia page it seems the motivation came from SLS - a
> derivative of Slackware.
[...]

Minor correction for you: Slackware was borne out of SLS and not the
other way around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

(feeling kinda old now that I realize that was 25 years ago, still
almost seems like yesterday sometimes)
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

Dear all,

Please CC me when answering or putting something on the thread.

When I started using ubuntu and then later Debian one of the first
tools I fell in love with was dpkg. Although nowadays we have multiple
tools like apt, aptitude, one of the biggest features of dpkg (which
is replicated by almost all tools are and were) upgrade, downgrade and
hold.

I was reading the wikipedia page about Debian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEKrafft200531.E2.80.9332_39-0
 and it just cites about dpkg being the essential package manager in
1996.

>From what I remember most rpm based distributions during that time had
rpm broken which means if you upgraded, you couldn't downgrade and
there were lots of times when the system broke due to one issue or the
other.

I was under the impression that due to rpm brokeness Debian and
thereafter dpkg came into being. From the wikipedia page it seems the
motivation came from SLS - a derivative of Slackware.

Could or does somebody remember what discussions took place when dpkg
was being put up as an ideal package manager. It still is, in case of
breakage or something goes wrong and the other tools can't fix.

I am more interested in what sort of scenario was then. I also read
that YUM the fedora package manager borrowed lot of ideas and
functionality from dpkg but do not know of any authoritative data to
backup, only rumors.

Could somebody share some info. on that.

Looking forward to know more.

-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A  2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8