Some discussion of apt came up during this month's meeting. I don't
think everyone's questions were answered, so maybe people can remedy
that situation now..
I'm mostly looking at this from the Debian perspective, I'm not sure how
much translates to apt4rpm..
A few things I remember from the conversation:
* dselect is a dpkg frontend, not an apt frontend, and it shouldn't be
used unless you're on an apt-less machine (or you're on masochistic
streak)
* aptitude is a dselect-like apt frontend that is somewhat easier to
use, and is a good thing to use for resolving conflicts when
upgrading or installing sets of packages
* apt-get is still the tool of choice when installing just a single
package, though it was never really meant to be a user tool.
Also, if you want to get a list of packages that are going to be
retrieved during an apt-get upgrade, you can pass the `-u' flag (like
`apt-get -u upgrade'). If you'd always like to see the list of
packages, edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and add the line
APT::Get::Show-Upgraded "true";
A number of people were wondering if there was an option available to
show the versions of the packages that will be retrieved with apt-get,
but I'm not sure if that's possible. Another reason to use aptitude, I
guess.
Also, a bunch of people were interested in a utility that could show the
installation history of packages on a system. This is useful for many
people, both from a personal and enterprise perspective. It's always
nice to have some assistance in figuring out what package version was
the last one that worked.
Along these lines, some people were wondering about package repositories
for old packages, since things tend to get deleted from mirrors rather
quickly. This would be hard to do, since there are so many packages out
there. However, I was thinking today that it might be worthwhile for
many organizations to build package caching servers of their own. The
apt-proxy package might be useful for people looking to do this (I think
I'll have to try it).
Here's something that I don't think really got discussed at the meeting,
but people might find interesting nonetheless. I generally like to run
Debian's testing version on my desktop, but some of the packages I
install need newer versions of software that aren't available in testing
yet.
I debated running my desktop as an unstable system, but decided that
would probably be a bad idea for me, since things tend to break for me
when I really need them. I found a better alternative, which is to add
unstable sources to my /etc/apt/sources.list, but configure apt to only
retrieve packages from the testing branch by default.
I merely added the unstable sources, and added the following line to
/etc/apt/apt.conf (similar things can be done by editing
/etc/apt/preferences, but I'll leave that as a reader exercise):
APT::Default-Release "testing";
Now, my system will usually try to download packages from the testing
branch, but I can override that and get packages from other branches by
doing
apt-get -t unstable install <package>
or
apt-get install <package>/unstable
Since it's hard to know what versions are available, you'll probably
want to install the apt-show-versions utility. Doing `apt-show-versions
-a <package>' will list all available versions of a package.
Lastly, I thought I'd mention that you can "pin" specific packages to a
particular version or branch of a distribution in the
/etc/apt/preferences file. I do this to keep my X server at the same
version, since I'm dependent upon Matrox for supplying me with a few
binaries when I want my dual-head display to work, and doing automatic
updates can cause version conflicts.
Package: xserver-xfree86
Pin: release v=4.2.1-3
Pin-Priority: 1001
You can look at the apt_preferences manual page for more information..
--
_ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Happiness is a warm CPU
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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