[plug] Red Hat package management

[James Devenish]

In message <3FC1D085.9000501 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 05:33:57PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> There's a common misunderstanding there.

True.

> just try using a Debian system without apt.

Did I just hear another can of worms burst open in the microwave? ;-)

Although 'dpkg -i' doesn't grab dependencies for you, the dpkg packaging
system is able to describe both the dependencies and where they can be
found. Even if you are installing a package from outside Debian, it is
possible to include information about dependenices. Although dpkg
"doesn't" make use of this, it potentially "could". I assume that the
functionality was put into dselect, rather than dpkg, so that there
could be an interactive interface to it (and because there's no
advantage to having the feature in dpkg when all the packages are coming
from an official Debian distribution anyway).

Perhaps it is a similar story with RPM -- I don't know. I suspect that
it is not, because APT support for RPM requires housekeeping files for
which the generation scripts are part of APT, rather than provided with
RPM (if I understand correctly).

Maybe you want to compare RPM with the Deb format, rather than with
dpkg. I would seem odd to me if I found out that .debs could contain the
locations at which dpkg could download dependencies. OTOH the .deb file
may contain a script is executed prior to the enforcement of
dependencies. That script could download package information / packages
from pre-determined locations. Thus, I imagine dpkg *could* do apt-like
things if developers were inclined to fashion their .debs in that way. I
assume RPM would have a similar script mechanism (%pre script? though I
I suspect it's only run after dependencies are satisfied).

PS. I have heard that some people prefer dselect and I presume that they
are happy to work without apt ;-)


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