Using a local server for unstable debs, I have a long-standing quibble
with apt-get: It often doesn't understand that a package is already
installed and "apt-get dist-upgrade" downloads and installs many
packages, sometimes hundreds of packages, whose exact same version is
already installed. I have complained about this on the lists and have a
bug tracker item open, but apparently no one else understands this
either, although it has been observed by others already years ago, at
least every time a new bindist comes out.
I have a symmetrical problem with fink --use-binary-dist: It very often,
and apparently randomly, refuses to use the binary dist, although the
package it is going to install does exist there.
The latest fight I have with this is related to a little script that I
want to distribute to our local Fink users. The idea is that new Fink
users or those who just have upgraded to Tiger use Fink's official 0.8.0
binary installer and then run this script (which is double-clickable).
It installs versions of /sw/etc/fink.conf and /sw/etc/apt/sources.list
that are adapted to our local situation and contain in particular the
address of our local unstable deb server, and fink.conf has unstable
enabled and UseBinaryDist: true. At the end it runs fink
selfupdate-rsync to bring the Fink distribution from the stable one
contained in the Fink binary installer to an up-to-date unstable-enabled
state. This command should download the latest versions of fink and the
base packages in binary form from the server. Often it doesn't do this
and starts to compile things from source which is very annoying, because
instead of a couple of seconds, it then takes almost 20 minutes even on
a dual G5.
This is also more or less random, in that it works as intended when I
test it, and it works also most of the time when users run the commands
from the command line, but when they use the script, it annoyingly
starts compiling almost all the time. I have preceded the fink
selfupdate by "fink scanpackages", "apt-get update" and by "fink update
fink" (which always does use the binary dist as it should), but to no avail.
I could, of course, use apt-get directly, or update the base packages
one by one, but since this is clearly a bug in Fink, I am still hoping
that someone who knows about these things will be able to repair it. I
don't believe that I am the only one seeing this. I rather suspect that
others have given up on --use-binary-dist because of this flaky behavior
and haven't said anything, because it isn't considered very important
anyway. At least that's what I have done until now.
Any help welcome
--
Martin
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