Monday April 12, 2004

At first I started messing around with Debian's vt100 utility, dselect (which it turns out is just a cheesey wrapper around dpkg) hoping to find something of the same caliber of the FreeBSD's package manager. 90% of the time, the FreeBSD tool won't give you too many surprises, it JFW's. I was not so lucky with dselect, what a POS! If you misfire some selection keystrokes and then leave your dselect session, you'll never be able to just undo what was there -- you can item-by-item set flags to "hold" the current state of individual packages but there's no way to just say, "the current state of the packages is how it is, don't flag anything for installation, removal, holding or whatever."

In the end, I read the man pages for apt-get and apt-cache; between the two of them, it looks like everything you'd want as far as package management tasks are available. My next foible was realizing that an installation can have a mix of packages from stable and the amusingly named unstable streams of Debian's deliberate development branches. Geez, I just needed libperl5.8 so I could compile something that embedded perl but the requirement to go to a different branch wasn't readily apparent from the dpkg -l listing (i.e. it required poking around a little research to discover that unlike the rest of the stable goodies, perl-base was from unstable).

And while I'm bitchin about how braindead linux distro's can get, what's with having libraries and header files in separate packages? What's I recall being so righteous about FreeBSD's ports-n-packages was that when you installed, say, zlib, you got the libraries and the headers -- there should be no need to install zlib-dev or something just to get the header files! What, are we concerned about diskspace usage? Why not just install the ding dang headers with the base package??

I remember a few years ago celebrating the news that the Open Packages project was going to bring the ports-n-packages thing of beauty to Linux and hopefully do for Linux what it'd been done for the BSD's a long time ago: a consistent, reliable and yet flexible package management system. IMO, RPM, Debian packages and Solaris packages all fall short. ( Apr 12 2004, 09:03:53 PM PDT ) Permalink