Mason Loring Bliss wrote > My questions: > > 1) Once I've got everything installed in a basic way, how do I build and > install the world myself? In NetBSD, it's as easy as "cd /usr/src ; make > build". What's the Debian equivalent?
Well, the packages are distributed in binary format (hence the multiple directories -- one for each binary architecture (and an architecture independent directory for docs etc, but I digress)). If you want to build the packages from the source, there is a source directory, and a file named <package>.orig.tar.gz. This is the original up-stream source. There is an associated diff file, which contains the differences between the original source and the source used to build the binary package. These differences are what make the binary packages work so well. They may include temporary bug fixes (until the up-stream maintainer fixes it), any may (for instance) move the installed location from /usr/local/... to /usr/.... As a rule, Debian leaves /usr/local alone for you to do what you want. > 2) What would you folks recommend as a boot manager that'll seamlessly > choose between NetBSD and Debian, letting me set the default arbitrarily? I've used LILO to boot between windows (95/NT) and linux. I assume it'll work for NetBSD as well. > 3) Is there an equivalent to the NetBSD practise of a nightly sup of > current sources? What's a nightly sup? > 4) How "automated" is the Debian package system? For instance, NetBSD will, > if presented with a package that requires something which doesn't exist > on the current system, ftp the package sources and build the package, etc. > If *that* package requires something else, it'll recursively snag everything > needed, ftping everything by itself and requiring no user intervention. Does > the Debian package system do this? The tool Dselect is pretty good -- if a little confusing till you get the hang of it. If you select a package which depends on something you don't have installed, it'll tell you there's a conflict, and try a best guess at resolving it. It's usually just a simple case of installed the needed package. But there are sometimes conflicts as well (for instance, emacs and xemacs share some of the same filenames which have different data. This makes it hard to install both at the same time). > 5) Is tcpwrappers a standard part of the system? What about IP-NAT? UUCP? Never used 'em. Dunno.
