[kwlug-disc] is it just me, or is debian package management painful?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Raul Suarez wrote:

> >----- Original Message ----
> >From: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>
> >I appreciate that there may be things i want to do that are arcane and obscure, but i
> >don't think the above operations qualify.
>
> I wasn't going to interject as I don't have anything useful to add
> to the original question.
>
> Funny thing is that I was thinking that you were trying to do
> something quite out of the ordinary.

  not at all -- it's something i've done on fedora a number of times.
sometimes, you just want to download an rpm file and install it from a
local directory, and "yum localinstall" lets you do just that.  it
will use your configured repos to resolve any dependencies.  i don't
think that's a particularly arcane operation.

> It is my impression that when people want to go out of their way to
> install something that is not in the repositories, they would get
> the individual packages themselves. After all, if they hand picked
> one package, why would they leave it for a tool to choose the
> dependencies.

  because it's easier.

> It seems that for the rest of us, as Khalid explained, freeloading
> on the people that already went through the trouble of matching
> dependencies is the way to go.
>
> I'll let you answer the question of "how arcane" by means of a
> different question: How many years have you been using Linux and
> installing packages. How many times have you had to do what you are
> trying to do?

  several.  and with yum, it's a piece of cake.

rday
--
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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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