Why I use Debian. Apt pros & cons

[Trevor Phillips]

Christian wrote:
> 
> As I've already said before in this thread, you cannot do this because
> other distributions don't have the same package organisational
> infrastructure that Debian has.  There may also be some potential
> incompatiblities in terms of differences between the capabilities of the
> different package formats but I'm not sure about the specifics of this.
> At this stage if you want to enjoy the benefits of APT then you will
> have to install Debian.

Yep! As far as I understand it, all the dependencies and such stem from
Debian's excellent package infrastructure. Apt is just a tool (albeit damn
handy) for reading the dependencies inherent in Debian packages, and analysing
how to best keep your system complete.

It's nice to see a bit of strong Debian advocacy. ^_^ 

I got sick of some Corel quirks on Sunday, so reinstalled the whole OS off a
Debian Slink R1 CD. Started at 5pm, and by about 10pm I had a working complete
Potato/Frozen system including KDE and Netscape. Most of that time was spent
with Apt doing a Distribution Upgrade over a 33.6k modem. ^_^

I have everything I need from Debian; there are a few things which are NOT in
the stable, or even Frozen main Package archives, but exist in third-party
Debian archives (such as kde.tdyc.com), and my experience is that even
third-party .deb's have well-implemented dependencies.

Just set up the Apt sources list, throw in the Apt source for your local Debian
mirror, throw in the Apt sources for a couple of third-party archives, and away
you go!

The main thing I find lacking in apt (so far) is a way to find a package. ie; I
know roughly something is named "blah", how do I find the package? You can use
Debian's Website package search, you can grep /var/state/apt/lists, but there's
no "apt search blat" feature (yet!) from the command line.

A GUI is another thing. They're working on console-apt (which does have
search), and there's some GUI ones like Corel's, but nothing fantastic, and I
like the simple command-line stuff. ^_^;;

(Note: If there IS a cmd-line apt-search, can someone let me know?? ^_^;;;)

By the way; is there a nice way to "reconfigure" or force a reinstall of a
Debian package? (Such that it'll re-set up default config files & such...)

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Systems Administrator      -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
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