Looks like I've really hit a nerve with the post of that article...
Rick Welykochy wrote:
> a question for you apt-getters: does the situation ever
> arise where apt-get gets way too ehtusiastic for your liking,
> and goes on an interminable installation spree that winds up
> screwing up your installed system?
apt-get is a rather versatile and informative program. You can tell
apt-get to do a simulation only. This prints out what apt-get is going
to do, like 'Install Package A, Install Package B, Configure Package A'
etc. It also tells you what packages it is going to install and remove
(and with a switch, upgrade) and it tells you how much it is going to
download and how much disk space will have been used after the
installation is complete. If it is doing more than just installing one
package (+ dependencies) it will prompt you for permission to continue
after informing you how much will be downloaded. Large downloads can be
interrupted halfway anyway (useful for a modem link), because apt-get
has the ability to continue where it left off later, for such an event.
There's also the difference between doing a simple 'upgrade' and doing a
'dist-upgrade'. Perhaps someone who's actually on a Debian box could
quote man apt-get for me.
Of course, it is entirely possible for apt-get to totally screw your
system, and if you've read debian-user for any length of time you'd have
seen messages like "dist-upgrade to woody totally screwed my system". Of
course, you have to make concessions when upgrading to an unstable
release because there can be package bugs, like missing dependencies for
example, that cause things to go wrong. Upgrades between stable releases
are a totally different story though, as by the time a distribution is
released, such package bugs will have been eliminated.
> I wuz always very afraid of Winblows auto-updates doing that,
> so have *never* recommended that to lusers. As well, I've found
> autorpm to be quite scary and stooooopid.
I've never used autorpm, so I don't know how stooooopid it actually is.
apt-get doesn't strike me as stooopid though.
Matthew
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