Why I use Debian. Apt pros & cons

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> 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.
In general, you are right, but as soon as you have one broken package,
your system will not be quite clean, and is not guaranteed to run
smoothly. It will probably never happen, but you might end up with trouble
a year down the track. Two examples:

 There was an Infomagic set didn't have a vital X library, and in fact,
had conflicting libraries that meant you'd probably never get X working if
you had a single X-related package from that CD. In fact, Infomagic got so
much flak from the Debian team (who provide CD-authoring tools
specifically designed to make sure your Debian archive is consistent an
workable) they decided not include Debian in their later compilations.

 Once apon a time, Debian had KDE packages in contrib. The KDE people had
their own packages. If you tried to mix and match, you'd be lucky to get
KDE started again, let alone working without completely removing all of
your KDE-related packages - and the KDE-built packages didn't uninstall
properly and required excorcism by hand. The reason Debian had to have
completely different packages is because the KDE-built ones ran roughshod
over the guidelines for WMs, libraries, etc, and didn't remove themselves
properly. The KDE-built packages are better know, apparently, but it is
less of an issue because Debian no longer do their own packages.

> 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.
Well, you could make a wrapper so that apt search $BLAH becomes grep $BLAH
<appropriate place> or lynx http://www.debian.org/packages/search?$BLAH

I'm happy with grep, myself, but I agree that apt would be better at
selecting the right context than grep, and would work offline better than
lynx. Maybe that's a project for someone learning C. (or is apt in perl?)

-Greg