Why I will never apt again

uways · 2008-10-30 17:02:25

I remember trying to remove networkmanager and evolution plus something else I think in Ubuntu and lost my entire ubuntu-desktop. Ugh that was a bad day

I don't however think that apt is all that awful. Served me well these past years (or am I just being sentimental?)

mentallaxative · 2008-10-30 17:15:03

Gullible Jones wrote:

OMG Slitaz is amazing! It's got all kinds of applications, good package management, MPlayer, Firefox, a beautiful default desktop, did I mention MPlayer... Wow. And NO RUNLEVELS! The init system makes Slackware's look clunky!
(Posting from it now, it's using only 67 MB of memory. Amazing, I tell you. I have never seen a distro like this before.)

Hopefully by the time 2.0 swings around the rough edges to do with dependency handling will have been addressed. A package manager written in bash seems to me... surprisingly simple.

jakadinho · 2008-10-30 17:38:24

icetonic wrote:

Before Arch I thought apt is the best package system ever...
I was wrong.

And a thing I always hated and will hate is RPM...

Same here

Renan Birck · 2008-10-30 21:52:05

I had plenty of problems with apt/dpkg on Ubuntu 6.10 (in fact, it was the most troublesome release of Ubuntu for me, and considering that 6.06 was perfect here).
In fact, one day it decided that glibc was not installed, even though it was, and this caused all sorts of problems.

This was one of the reasons for me to leave Ubuntu and think a lot before trying any Debian-based distros.

cardinals_fan · 2008-10-30 23:07:03

mentallaxative wrote:

Hopefully by the time 2.0 swings around the rough edges to do with dependency handling will have been addressed. A package manager written in bash seems to me... surprisingly simple.

2.0 looks like it will be great. I've actually thought about writing my own packaging system (because we surely don't have enough ), but Tazpkg does everything mine would have. Tazwok is very elegant and powerful.

Gullible Jones · 2008-10-31 02:27:16

Unfortunately tazpkg doesn't do dependencies on uninstall... Yet, anyway.

However, for something so new it's amazingly good. And *fast*.

(Slitaz in fact seems to me the fastest distribution I've ever used... Once some of the bugs get ironed out, and if it starts supporting suspend/hibernate and 3D, I may use it as my main OS.)

cardinals_fan · 2008-10-31 18:04:59

Gullible Jones wrote:

Unfortunately tazpkg doesn't do dependencies on uninstall... Yet, anyway.
However, for something so new it's amazingly good. And *fast*.
(Slitaz in fact seems to me the fastest distribution I've ever used... Once some of the bugs get ironed out, and if it starts supporting suspend/hibernate and 3D, I may use it as my main OS.)

I'll use it as my primary if they can:

a) Make NVIDIA drivers a bit easier to install - a package would be nice. That's the only thing that I've had real trouble with on any distro for a while.

b) I need hplip in the repos. Downloading all the dependencies and compiling it has never worked for me.

R00KIE · 2008-11-05 22:15:25

apt-get install works great when you are stuffing your system .... when you start trying to slim it down by doing apt-get remove then things get bad.
No more apt-get for me if I can avoid it.
And ...... isn't aptitude just a front end for apt-get that somehow acts as a front end for dpkg? I think thats how things worked on ubuntu 7.10 .... maybe I'm very wrong though.

Sophotect · 2008-11-14 01:24:17

apt-shred dist-chainsaw

SCNR

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-19 03:33:43

Update... It was all my fault.

Let me explain. For security reasons, I had my /var and /tmp partitions mounted noexec. On Arch Linux, this can be done without issue. (Yay.)

On Debian, however, install and uninstall scripts are invoked by being executed. In /var. Which means that, if you uninstall something and you have /var mounted noexec, you may get permission denied errors.

And if uninstall scripts don't run... Things can get screwed up. Which is what happened to me. I tried doing what I had done again with /var mounted exec, and couldn't reproduce the incident.

So... I was completely wrong about APT. Those of you who are Debian fans, please accept my apologies.

(You know, I feel like this is becoming a bit of a habit for me...)

Daenyth · 2008-11-19 12:04:01

That's still an incredibly stupid system

Shapeshifter · 2008-11-20 09:43:23

After more than half a year (when I was occasionally using ubuntu) I had to install an ubuntu server yesterday. I was shocked at how ugly aptitude output is! I literally lol'd when "aptitude install iotop" generated about 15 lines of output with "not found" somehwere in the middle... Why is it doint stuff like "Building dependency tree..." even after it already told me that it failed? So much output with just one try to install a package that doesn't exist...

string · 2008-11-20 10:02:51

Debian GNU/Linux SID (unstable) was my distribution of choice before I headed over to Arch Linux. I've used it (Debian) continuously for a fair amount of time (can't say I quite remember exactly for how long) with no or little problems as far as package management was concerned.

Gullible Jones: I wasn't on this forum when this thread was started (it caught my attention because of the recent posts added to it), but so I'm glad you figured things out.

Oh, and Daenyth: No, it isn't -- " "

Last edited by string (2008-11-20 10:03:22)

bgc1954 · 2008-11-20 13:58:56

Gullible Jones wrote:
Update... It was all my fault.

I can relate. The other day I was doing an apt-get dist-upgrade--even tried aptitude safe-upgrade--on an installed ubuntu hardy partition on my hard drive but screwed up my /etc/apt/sources.list. I changed all the repos from hardy to intredpid except I missed the main repo somehow--too many lines in an ubuntu sources.list . What a mess --some stuff installed but other stuff wouldn't because of dependency problems. It took literally hours of messing about until I finally discovered that the main repo was still set to hardy. After I rectified that problem everything went quite smoothly so I don't quite hate apt-get or aptitude...yet.

Daenyth · 2008-11-20 18:19:52

I'd just like to mention that I've never talked with anyone who claimed pacman broke their system

sand_man · 2008-11-21 04:37:51

pacman almost broke my system. But it wasn't pacman's fault. It was a combination of pacbuilder and my own stupidity.

l33tunderground · 2008-11-23 01:57:59

Gullible Jones wrote:

Good to hear... The Slackware school of thought needs better representation on the desktop, IMHO. Vector (outdated), Zenwalk (buggy), and GoblinX (much better live than on the desktop) don't really cut it.
(From what I can see the Slitaz initscripts aren't exactly like Slackware's, but pretty similar - i.e. no maze of symlinks.)

Try Wolvix I used it for a while before I came to Arch and I was never disappointed with it. The only issue might have been the package manager, but it's been many months since I last used it.

rok3 · 2008-11-23 05:48:51

I feel like my apt-based machines suffer some serious bloat over time no matter what I do to them. Anyone else notice this?

As long as I run pacman -Scc every couple weeks Arch feels as snappy as it did the first day I installed.

Oh! Also it's great not to have to deal with machine-breaking mega updates every 6 months!

Last edited by rok3 (2008-11-23 05:50:13)

Themaister · 2008-11-23 21:30:32

Daenyth wrote:

I'd just like to mention that I've never talked with anyone who claimed pacman broke their system

Indeed. I'm simply amazed at how Arch can stay bleeding (suicidal edge in my case ) egde and still not being broken by pacman. Had one really nasty occation where I had to reinstall Arch, but again, my own stupidity while compiling the kernel

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-23 22:05:05

rok3 wrote:

I feel like my apt-based machines suffer some serious bloat over time no matter what I do to them. Anyone else notice this?
As long as I run pacman -Scc every couple weeks Arch feels as snappy as it did the first day I installed.
Oh! Also it's great not to have to deal with machine-breaking mega updates every 6 months!

The machine-breaking update every six months is an Ubuntu specialty, Debian doesn't have that. If you want a stable apt-based system I'd suggest Debian Testing; if you want to live on the edge, use Sid (or Sidux if you want a ready-made desktop and desktop-optimized kernel). Sid usually contains a few broken packages, but I've never seen essential packages broken; and Sidux has replacements for anything that happens to be broken.

FWIW, 'apt-get clean' or 'aptitude clean' does the same thing as 'pacman -Scc'.

'apt-get autoremove --purge' removes stuff that you don't need anymore. Be careful with it though, apt-get is not as smart as pacman (thus aptitude, which doesn't need autoremove).

If fragmentation is a problem - although not all filesystems have an inline defragger, I think jfs_fsck defragments, and e2fsck has an option to optimize directories (which I think = defragmenting). I don't think this should be a huge issue though, most Linux filesystems do not fragment easily.

Daenyth · 2008-11-24 00:04:58

Gullible Jones wrote:

[...]Sid usually contains a few broken packages, but I've never seen essential packages broken; and Sidux has replacements for anything that happens to be broken.[...]

I'm actually really impressed by Arch in this respect. From what I've heard, debian has dozens of devs, some paid, and Arch still manages to win on package quality with fewer staff and less money behind it.

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-24 00:32:01

Really? From what I've seen Arch seems about on par with Debian Testing, and Arch Testing with Sid... You'd probably know better though, being a TU and all

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-24 11:30:42

Hmm... Looks like /tmp can't be mounted noexec either on dpkg-based distros. Now that is just stupid.

Edit: there is a hack to make it work with APT... Still, pretty stupid. Stuff just shouldn't be executed from /tmp!

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2008-11-24 11:33:36)

jacko · 2008-11-24 18:35:25

This was posted on the LFS mailing list

Hello LFS users,
The easy management of installed software packages is always
an important concern. After compiling, the "make install" command
does not help the user at all in knowing where the installed files
are located. The major Linux distributions have invented many types
of package management schemes but most of those are very complex.
The LFS user may find the following much simpler package manager,
called treeutils, to be very useful:
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/~edgy/treeutils/t … est.tar.gz
Treeutils does not use any database and it depends only on bash
and a few other basic utilities. The usage is simple. After
compiling, a DESTDIR is specified:
make DESTDIR=/tmp-dir install
Then, from the DESTDIR directory, treeutils is invoked:
insttree package-name
This command will install all the files under the DESTDIR directory
and also creates a text file as a permanent record of the installation.
To see what is installed and where it is installed, the user just opens
the record file in any text editor. Since all the record files
are kept in the same directory, a listing of this directly will
neatly show every package that exists on a particular system.
To remove a package, just issue the command:
removetree package-name
I use treeutils for every package on my system and I can
quickly know everything about every installed file.
With a bit of practice, using treeutils as part of the
"configure && make && make install" becomes very natural.
Also, because treeutils is a collection of bash scripts,
they each can be easily modified or customized to, for example,
change the installation directories, etc.
It is worth checking out.
FP

Being bash scripts, I assume it could easily be converted to accept packages like arch. Does anyone wanna pick up a new pet project?

RedShift · 2008-11-24 22:54:25

Yeah apt/dpkg is pretty much FAIL when it comes to package management. Pre- and postinstall scripts are the root of all evil. I even prefer using RPM/yum. But I especially hate other distro's because of their clumsy init scripts.

Last edited by RedShift (2008-11-24 22:55:17)

Arch Linux

#26 2008-10-30 17:02:25

Re: Why I will never apt again

#27 2008-10-30 17:15:03

Re: Why I will never apt again

#28 2008-10-30 17:38:24

Re: Why I will never apt again

#29 2008-10-30 21:52:05

Re: Why I will never apt again

#30 2008-10-30 23:07:03

Re: Why I will never apt again

#31 2008-10-31 02:27:16

Re: Why I will never apt again

#32 2008-10-31 18:04:59

Re: Why I will never apt again

#33 2008-11-05 22:15:25

Re: Why I will never apt again

#34 2008-11-14 01:24:17

Re: Why I will never apt again

#35 2008-11-19 03:33:43

Re: Why I will never apt again

#36 2008-11-19 12:04:01

Re: Why I will never apt again

#37 2008-11-20 09:43:23

Re: Why I will never apt again

#38 2008-11-20 10:02:51

Re: Why I will never apt again

#39 2008-11-20 13:58:56

Re: Why I will never apt again

#40 2008-11-20 18:19:52

Re: Why I will never apt again

#41 2008-11-21 04:37:51

Re: Why I will never apt again

#42 2008-11-23 01:57:59

Re: Why I will never apt again

#43 2008-11-23 05:48:51

Re: Why I will never apt again

#44 2008-11-23 21:30:32

Re: Why I will never apt again

#45 2008-11-23 22:05:05

Re: Why I will never apt again

#46 2008-11-24 00:04:58

Re: Why I will never apt again

#47 2008-11-24 00:32:01

Re: Why I will never apt again

#48 2008-11-24 11:30:42

Re: Why I will never apt again

#49 2008-11-24 18:35:25

Re: Why I will never apt again

#50 2008-11-24 22:54:25

Re: Why I will never apt again

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