Re: [Nolug] Distro suggestions

On Wednesday 05 November 2003 10:43 am, Alex McKenzie wrote:
> So what makes the deb system work for deep upgrades? I remember the
> horrors I went through with rpm, especially the snafu of upgrading to
> rpm-4. Is deb more flexible about dependencies? Or is it just the
> convenience of apt?

It's really simple

rpm has file level dependency resolution
deb has package level dependency resolution

Of course package level makes more sense. There is no dependency hell
in debian stable.

Example: deb's have "depends" but also the opposite, "provides", which
is nice.

This lets debian have packages and dependencies like
"mail-transport-agent" or "www-browser". Many packages in turn will
depend on "mail-transport-agent" or "www-browser", naturally, since
many apps need to send mail or have a web browser to function properly.
Nevertheless, you certainly don't want a package to depend on "mozilla"
or konqueror or sendmail or postfix, etc.

Of course any of the major MTA's will satisfy the "mail-transport-agent"
dependency, through the "provides" mechanism.

They also have very nice little things like the "equivs" package. What
if you don' want any of the MTA's provided by debian? You roll your
own, and use the "equivs" package to tell the system that the
dependency has been met.

An rpm based distro could never do any of these things, because they
have file level dependency resolution. Not only is that annoying when
trying to install or upgrade packages, the real issue is a package
doesn't have the neccessary information to satisfy it's own
dependencies, other than knowing that it needs "libk3wnnm5.so.2", which
is a mess.

That said rpm does have some nice things, but it really needs a higher
level abstraction (such as apt-get), and they need to dump the file
dependencies.

In addition to dpkg, then there are all the attendant tools:
apt-cache
apt-get
apt-zip
apt-cdrom
apt-show-source
apt-show-versions
apt-build
apt-spy
grep-excuses
debconf
apt-listchanges
grep-available
grep-status
kernel-package
equivs

I like debian because:

- they NEVER make assumptions about what's good for you
- they have generally very high quality packages
- it's very organized and systematic, yet extremely flexible, which
allows for trouble free upgrades
- the repository is enormous

The Debian Bug Tracking System is another nice thing. No other
distribution has a bug system that is so honest.

Debian is also considerate - they don't just have "apache" like Red Hat,
they have apache, apache2, apache-ssl, and apache2-ssl. and you can
have all of them installed without confilcts. Same for gimp1.2 and
gimp1.3, etc. They do this for many programs. Red Hat just assumes
you want apache2 with ssl. Lazy.

Debian is the only distro that has a social contract with it's users.

Debian is just so beautifully architected. I could go on ... anyone want
to add?

-- 
Tim Kelley
tpk at 23rdward dot org
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