I have my own MTA, thank you very much
How do I convince Debian that I have my own MTA, thank you very much, and it shouldn't attempt to install one of its own choosing? Is there a way to permanently fulfill a dependency by hand without installing a package? I'm not interested in having to tell dselect, dpkg, or apt to ignore dependencies. I want to tell them that I have fulfilled a dependency via non-package means, and never be asked about that dependency again. -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
why no package status feature for dpkg?
Why does dpkg not have a way to check the cksum's of the package's contents. I deleted a bunch of man pages, and now I find myself having to write perl scripts to coerce dpkg into releasing the information about missing files. And even then, I won't know if a file is really undamaged. It wouldn't be such a problem except that I did an FTP install, and a gnome upgrade, which needed some other things from potatoe (fortunately Quayl has givene up the ghoste). Plus I upgraded to the current kernel from potato because my new hardware runs Linux unreliably and I wanted to make sure it wasn't due to old drivers. Plus I needed some gnome things out of CVS to get the latest version, because gnome developers have this nasty habit of writing their applications to the current libraries, not the stable libraries. So who *knows* what I'm running now, and whether it corresponds to anything remotely resembling Official Debian 2.0. Somebody remind me again how .deb is the perfect packaging format, sublime in all the details of its creation, without flaw in its every detail, and how all others (should) bow low to it. I still haven't found an explanation of why RPM sucks so badly that Debian developers cannot fix it. I mean, xterm sucked so badly that somebody had to create xterm-debian and break everybody's termcap, so why not RPM-debian and break everybody else's RPM manipulators? -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
Re: why no package status feature for dpkg?
Ben Collins writes: Umm, how about installing debsums and read the manpage. Because it's too late? Sounds like I should have had debsums installed from the beginning. -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
why no linuxconf package?
Linuxconf uses the GPL. Is there some non-technical reason why there is no Debian package for Linuxconf? (I just have this idea that Debian suffers from NIH -- dare I say RPM?) -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
Re: why no linuxconf package?
Noah L. Meyerhans writes: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Russell Nelson wrote: Linuxconf uses the GPL. Is there some non-technical reason why there is no Debian package for Linuxconf? (I just have this idea that Debian suffers from NIH -- dare I say RPM?) Apparently linuxconf is included with potato (debian 2.2, which is in development). IMHO this is really not a good thing, because linuxconf has a nasty tendancy to create scripts that are easily machine parsable but are absolutely unreadable to humans. One of Debians greatest assets is its remote, console based admin capability. To me, linuxconf really breaks this. If it breaks this, then linuxconf needs fixing. But that's more a matter of fixing linuxconf than rejecting it. It's okay if a GUI admin tool writes out structured configuration files, but it MUST be able to read in any modifications made by hand, and it SHOULD write configuration files which are human-readable. I don't think it's fair at all to say that Debian suffers from the NIH syndrome. Did we write sendmail, apache, emacs, or perl? RedHat didn't write linuxconf (in fact, linuxconf is incompatible with redhat's own AnotherLevel config tool (I think that's the right name)). So it's not like we've got a problem with stuff written by people doing work for other distributions. And there are fundamental reasons why we use something other than RPM. The Debian package format is inherently better. RPM has already been broken^H^H^H^H^H^Himproved once already. I don't see why it can't be improved to include any advantages that DEB has. I mean, in an era when XEmacs and GNU Emacs are talking about merging back, and egcs is becoming gcc-3.0, can't we all get along? This has been debated by the developers quite often. Somebody else can probably give you a more detailed history of this issue. I already asked, and didn't get one. But Colin Marquardt pointed me to http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/ , which is better than nothing. -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
where is summary of rpm! No, .deb!! No, .rpm!!!?
Is there a cogent summary somewhere of the arguments for/against Debian switching to (and presumably fixing any problems with) .rpm packaging? -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://crynwr.com/~nelson Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
Re: slink problems
Stephane Bortzmeyer writes:
Many other suggestions have been made to solve the problem. It is not easy.
You have to find:
- a good scheme (think of X11-only installers, without a tty),
- implement it (i.e. modify 3000 packages' {pre,post}{rm,inst}.
Nonsense. The solution is quite easy. Modify the routine that
handles the installers so it *also* looks for installers whose names
start with 0 (the single digit 0). If one is found, do not look for a
name without a zero (to ensure that you don't find the same script
twice). Process the installers sorted by name and dependency. At the
same time (actually, before *or* after), instruct package creators to
create a hard link to their installers ONLY if the installer will
never ask questions. Give that link the same name prepended by a
zero.
No coordination is needed, and no flag day need occur. People just
start doing things the new way (ln foo.pre 0foo.pre; echo done).
After a year or so, modify the specification so that installers that
do not ask questions must start with a zero.
Actually, the right way to solve this problem is for Debian to adopt
webmin (http://webmin.com), and say installers do not ask questions,
period. If you need configuration, write a webmin package. But
obviously that's a lot more work.
--
-russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://crynwr.com/~nelson
Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so
521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur
Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
Re: slink problems
Stephane Bortzmeyer writes: [I'm not on debian-admintool and I hate posting on lists where I'm not.] That's why they have open archives. :) On Thursday 5 August 1999, at 11 h 6, the keyboard of Russell Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: create a hard link to their installers ONLY if the installer will never ask questions. Give that link the same name prepended by a Some install scripts HAVE TO ask questions. Right. They get sorted to the end, so you end up with: o Select package (or packages) o Download o Install questionless packages o Install questionable :) packages That way, you get a big chunk of no attention needed time in the middle. Presumably you actually want to use the machine after it's been installed, so there's no cost (in human attention) to asking a few config questions immediately before the install process finishes. Actually, the right way to solve this problem is for Debian to adopt webmin (http://webmin.com), The idea seems right but the solution is not: WebMin is horribly non-free, so there is no chance Debian will adopt it. If someone could write a similar free program, I'll pay him/her a beer when he will visit Paris (actually, several beers, if the program works). It's not horribly non-free, it only lacks the freedom to redistribute modifications. Horribly non-free would be [ insert your favorite proprietary software here]. But yes, I can see why Debian would not adopt it. -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://crynwr.com/~nelson Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
slink problems
Um, it's quite annoying to be constantly interrupted to interact various programs during the configuration phase of a Debian install. If it's an absolute requirement for configuration scripts to be able to ask questions, then perhaps there could be two categories, ones which never ask questions and all the others. Run the non-interactive ones first. Also, I just did a home FTP installation, and there were various errors, but because of all the chatty configuration scripts, I have no idea what those errors were. Also, why does *every* window manager suggest that it should be installed as the default? And why does every X server ask if it should replace the current X server? -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://crynwr.com/~nelson Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Government schools are so 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | bad that any rank amateur Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | can outdo them. Homeschool!
