On 15 Feb 2008, at 11:57 pm, Andrew Piskorski wrote:
Those are good hints...
Debian and Ubuntu have excellent package management functionality and
and repositories (as good or better than any other major Linux or Unix
distribution, AFAIK), but strangely, by default they have no
consistent API or command set for using it. Therefore, I recommend
trying out wajig:
sudo apt-get install wajig
http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/Wajig_Overview.html
It's really just a wrapper (in Python) around all the same underlying
command-line tools, but in my limited use of it so far, it seems
noticeably more convenient than the traditional bizarre, non-
orthogonal
mishmash of apt-get, dpkg, apt-cache, apt-file, etc.
(I don't know if/how it compares to aptitude, I've never used that.)
aptitude has pretty much the same CLI as apt-get, and all of the APT
family are fairly consistent. dpkg is different, of course, but then
it's much older. It was also written by Ian Jackson, who's a very
nice guy (and a friend of mine) but who has a tendency to write user
interfaces which don't correspond to the brains of most people. :-)
Just kidding, Ian, if you read this. dpkg, actually, I find quite
nice (nicer than rpm anyway, but that's probably just because I'm used
to it). dselect, Ian's wrapper around dpkg, really is a UI nightmare
though, and should really be quietly taken out into the woods and
shot. I think there are plans to remove it from Debian, but it hasn't
happened yet. dselect's hideousness is a large part of why aptitude
exists.
The Debian package management tools don't seem to have any sane
programming API, but so far I haven't really needed that (and wajig
manages to do without).
There are some perl modules, I think, but they're not well
documented. I've never needed them either.
Their only other major flaw that I'm aware of, is that, just like all
the rpm based tools, you can only have one single version of a binary
package installed at a time (yuck!).
That's not true. Look at the gcc or emacs packages. Or automake. Or
autoconf. Many, many versions, all of which can coexist on your
system at the same time, and you can use update-alternatives to choose
which one is the default. The trick is that the packages have to have
different names, so in the case of gcc there are gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4,
gcc-4.1 etc. In the more obvious cases where people are going to want
to have the choice, this has already been done. Of course there are
plenty of cases where it hasn't, and then yes, you're right, you can't
have more than one at once. But Debian does have the infrastructure
to support it.
Perhaps one day, the sort of
tools the NixOS and DragonFly BSD folks are working on will fix that.
http://nix.cs.uu.nl/index.html
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2176
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/goals.shtml#packages
--
Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.piskorski.com/
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected]
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
