Why I use Debian. Apt pros & cons

[Steven Leopardi]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 07:49:42AM +0000, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> 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...)
dpkg-reconfigure packagename
> 
> -- 
> . Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
> : Web Systems Administrator      -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
> | IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
>  >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
> | On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
> | course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
>  \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /

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          Steven Leopardi                       steven at aceonline.com.au       
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