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APT for MDK?


yr2alex
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Hello,

 

I was just wondering if perhaps anyone in the community of Mandrake Linux users could shed some light on the subject of Package Management with regard to Mandrakes recent acquisition of Connectiva. If I am not mistaken Connectiva was responsible for porting Debian's Apt-Get to rpm based Distros for example Fedora Core. That being said is here's my question, is there a possibility that Connectiva's package management model such as Apt-Get (Synaptic) or Smart RPM will be ported over to Mandrakes URPMI perhaps as an enhancement? Please don't misunderstand my thinking, I'm sure that Mandrake envisioned Product enhancement when considering the acquisition- making something good better right?

 

What do you think?

 

YR2ALEX

 

[moved from Forum Discussion by spinynorman]

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i can't see it because there is no point.

Fedora and connectiva didn't have URPMI and used apt-get but the bottom lin eis that the main difference for me between apt and urpmi is apt is much better at configuring the packages ..through debconf.

After you install from apt into debian its up and runing whether its webmin, apache whatever ... the downside is that it helps to have decided all the parameters before you apt-get!

 

urpmi tends to leave you high and dry in that the packages are installed but that's it. Base config files are written but there is no attempt like in dbpk to actually configure them.

This is less important because (IMHO) Mandrake is not a server distro...

 

However if you add apt suuport what do you get extra apart from other repositories not already available... you are likely to create as many deps as you solve in these because if its not available then the libraries are probably not going to work either.

 

Its a sticky question..... will Mandrake drop urpmi and go to deb's or not?

 

Suse has convinced LSB that RPM's are the way to go....

nice work Suse... they work fine if you have YAST to config em... and you build em specially for suse and .... (abut 101 reasons)...

 

Personally Ive found apt to be better for server stuff... and no real difference or advantage (except more sources) over URPMI....

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apt, synaptic and smart are all in MDK contrib, and there's a couple of MDK repositories that will work with apt if you're so inclined. Rafael is apparently interested in the possibility of using smart as the default MDK package tool in the fairly-distant future. There's been some interesting discussion about it on the Cooker mailing list since the Conectiva guys started posting there. apt4rpm wouldn't be considered as a default, and smart needs to get several features from urpmi that it's lacking, but it may be the way things go in the future.

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Its as good as (and some would argue better ) than urpmi

Its just another choice which is what Linux is all about eh?

Dunno... URPMI is what MDK is about?

I can't see it working as well for MDK as apt ?

Just like alien packages are always a risk in deb

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I must ask, would this be a good thing for the user base?

 

As a roughly 6-months' user of Linux, just beginning to get comfy with URPMI in both GUI and CLI, the idea of a whole new package-management philosophy terrifies me. If they did such a thing for 10.2, I might well cut my losses and install that SuSE 9.2 DVD that's been tempting me lately.

 

I don't claim to know what would be a _good_ outcome of these two very different distro philosophies coming together, but any sudden major changes to either product would be a BAAD idea (and I don't mean the town in Yemen). Package management (plus what packages are actually available in the repo's) is one of the defining features of any distro, so foisting an alternative default onto the 'faithful' is not to be done lightly.

 

[Thanks Mum, you can put your soap back in this box now.]

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the format (and even the tool) are not the philosophy. As I've mentioned, you can actually use apt to run MDK, right now, quite successfuly. apt-get has a powerful generic dependency resolver, you can generate apt lists right from the current Cooker packages and dependencies, and they work. using apt or smart wouldn't mean you have to change MDK packaging policy, update policy or dependency policy automatically.

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OK, but adamw, you seem to have the insiude track.

The question is why?

What does anyone gain from this?

 

Unless its a Mandrake RPM then their can be issues with locations of libs etc. so other than extra packages not available on plf what does using smart-rpm or apt actually provide over RPM?

 

I tried apt4rpm in Suse 64 bit (not 64 bit) and it was terrible .. I don't think its the tool, but the fact many libs were just not available in 64 bit. The same would be true for mandrake RPM's .. lots of non mandrake ones but they wouldn't have the mandrake library paths.

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apt has alot more options than urpmi. apt is a more powerfull tool.

 

as to your experience, 64 bit applications arent as available as 32 bit is. you can set the server for 64 bit mirrors.

 

http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/

 

mandrake repositories

Mandrake

 

Mandrake-cooker: ftp://ftp.uninett.no/pub/linux/apt

look inside the above mentioned directory for the sources.list file.

 

look at the features, then read the howto. faq's are good to.

 

Why is apt better than rpm?

On rpm based Linux systems, if you want to install a new application that requires other "dependencies" to be installed first, you have to manually install the dependencies yourself. Even supposedly easier-to-use tools such as Kpackage don't automate the process of fetching dependencies, but apt-get does so nicely.

 

i dont want to quote the whole site. so go and read for yourself.

 

linuxjournal says this about apt http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6672

 

and http://www.spack.org/wiki/UsingApt?action=...edirect=AptHelp

 

Using Apt

 

apt-get install <package name>

 

This will download and install the package and any other packages it requires. If other packages are required to successfully install it will prompt you for an "okay" before it actually does it.

 

apt-get remove <package name>

 

Removes (eg. 'dpkg -r') the package and any other packages that depend on it. If it's going to remove anything you didn't explicitly request it to it will prompt you before doing it.

 

apt-get clean

 

Removes all downloaded packages from /var/cache/apt/archives, this is a good housekeeping thing to do every once in a while.

 

apt-get update

 

Updates apt's knowledge of which packages are available. If you try and install something and get errors saying that the specified package is "not found" this is most likely the cause.

 

apt-get upgrade

 

This upgrades to the latest versions of all currently installed packages that are available to you (eg. if you're you have stable specified in your /etc/apt/sources.list file packages from unstable won't be available).

 

apt-get dist-upgrade

 

As above but this is for moving from stable to unstable. It's designed to deal more gracefully with problems that can sometimes occur with upgrades between versions (eg. the infamous libc6 upgrade which would break your system if you didn't install the new packages in a certain order).

 

apt-cache search <string>

 

Will show any package (and it's short description) which can be found in the packages database which matches <string> in the packages name or description.

 

apt-cache --names-only search <string>

 

Will show any package (and it's short description) which can be found in the packages database which matches <string> in packages name only.

 

apt-cache show <package name>

 

Will show all the information known about a given package.

 

apt-get moo

 

<shhhh> ....

 

apt-cache showpkg <package name>

 

This shows all package dependency information for this package, including the sometimes very useful "reverse-provides" which lists packages which depend on it.

 

apt-get -d install <package name>

 

Will download all requires packages to /var/cache/apt/archives but won't install them.

 

apt-get --compile source <package name>

 

Will download the source package and diffs and compile it into a .deb for you. this requires some of the debian packaging tool packages. You also must have a line in your /etc/apt/sources.list file similar to this:

 

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

 

apt-get -t <release> install <package name>

 

Used in combination with the Default-Release parameter in your /etc/apt/apt.conf this allows you to list multiple releases (ie. testing and unstable) in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. You can set one as the default and then specifically install from another via this command. See the online tutorial on Apt-Pinning.

 

console-apt or aptitude

 

Some console based gui's for apt. They do things slightly differently then each other and are nice when you're starting out. I used to use console-apt (aka capt) but haven't used either for quite a while.

 

apt-listchange <options>

 

If you set this to work with apt (it'll ask you after you install it) then every time you install a package with apt it will show you what's changed from your old installed version and the newly installed version. On a production system it's often nice to see this info before you actually do the upgrade, there's a command below that will help you with that.

 

auto-apt

 

I only just discovered about this, it appears to automate the installation of packages on an "as needed" basis. I don't understand why and how you would do this yet. More as I play with it.

 

It comes in handy when you ./configure; make; make install software from source. Use auto-apt run ./configure and all things the configure-script is looking for will be downloaded and installed "on-demand" an "just-in-time". To be more precise: the packages containing the missing files will be apt-get install-ed. After all you continue with make and make install as normal.

For further reading see How to install packages "on demand" in the Apt-HOWTO and auto-apt's man-page. -- [^http://www.patrick-willam.de Patrick Willam]

 

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://ipofproxyserver:port";

 

Put this in your /etc/apt/apt.conf if you need to use a proxy server with apt.

 

APT::Default-Release "testing";

 

Put this in /etc/apt/apt.conf if you have more then one distribution selected (eg. both testing and unstable) in /etc/apt/sources.list. It can be used in combination with 'apt-get -t'.

 

tell me urpmi can compete with that. it cant. this can be used in conjunction with urpmi. but with all this....why? as you can see there are mandrake repositories. and apt4rpm was ported and developed by conectiva. mandrake just bought conectiva.

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OK, but adamw, you seem to have the insiude track. 

The question is why? 

What does anyone gain from this? 

 

Unless its a Mandrake RPM then their can be issues with locations of libs etc. so other than extra packages not available on plf what does using smart-rpm or apt actually provide over RPM? 

 

I tried apt4rpm in Suse 64 bit (not 64 bit) and it was terrible ..  I don't think its the tool, but the fact many libs were just not available in 64 bit.  The same would be true for mandrake RPM's .. lots of non mandrake ones but they wouldn't have the mandrake library paths.

What do you benefit?

 

Synaptic. It's an awesome program.

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as to your experience, 64 bit applications arent as available as 32 bit is. you can set the server for 64 bit mirrors

and thats the point. I can't see as many mandrake specific RPM's being packaged specially....so it will end up being similar.

 

suse doesn't have a real package management system of its own like URPMI or APT hence using apt is a great step forwards. However urpmi does resolve all deps *if* you only use mandrake RPM's.

 

The fundamental problem with RPM's is there is no standard in terms of the base system apart from RH and Mandrake but especially Suse do not respect the package developers and move the installation locations.

 

Hence a Suse KDE app is unlikely to work properly on MDK..and the other way round.. etc.

 

Using Mandrake I try and never install from source and if I do I should package myself an RPM and install it that way.

 

Synaptic is great Iphitus... like the *old* Mandrake add/remove progs before they fsck'd the whole thing in 9.0,. you can add/update and remove all from the same place.

 

 

apt-get install <package name>

urpmi --noclean <package name> (grr me hates default option)

 

apt-get remove <package name>

urpme <package name>

 

apt-get clean

... not a 'problem' with urpmi's default deletion policy (grrrr)

 

apt-get update

urpmi.updatemedia -a

 

etc. etc.

 

Don't get me wrong *I love synaptec and apt... (on debian) I just seem to be missing why i would do this on a clean Mandrake system.... especially if I were running OE...

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Not sure what you mean by using non MDK packages, you don't have to do that. This is my apt sources list pre- installed. ( thacs mdk version of apt )

As you can see there all MDK rpms so no chance of installing something incompatible.

 
# plf free 
rpm ftp://ftp.easynet.fr/plf/mandrake/free/10.1/ hdlist . 

# plf nonfree 
rpm ftp://ftp.easynet.fr/plf/mandrake/non-free/10.1/ hdlist . 

# updates 10.1  
rpm fftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/official/updates/10.1/main_updates/ media_info/hdlist . 

# main mandrake 10.1 
rpm ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/official/10.1/i586/media/main/ media_info/hdlist . 

# contrib mandrake 10.1 
rpm ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/official/10.1/i586/media/contrib/ media_info/hdlist . 

# jpackage mandrake 10.1 
#rpm ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/official/10.1/i586/jpackage/ media_info/hdlist . 

# Chips rpms 10.1 
#rpm http://mirror.datapipe.net/norlug/mandrake-10.1/RPMS/ hdlist . 

# eslrahc rpms 10.1 
rpm http://www.eslrahc.com/10.1/ hdlist . 

# thacs.rpms 10.1 
rpm http://rpm.nyvalls.se/10.1/RPMS/ hdlist .

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