14 Feb
2005
14 Feb
'05
11:13 a.m.
Eric Dondelinger wrote:
You really want to have a look at Debian and apt.
Not sure ;-)
I did look into Debian when I was looking for the "right" distro, but it
failed to impress me.
BTW, apt-get isn't perfect either, the folks at Conectiva are working on
a replacement that is cross-distro, see http://www.smartpm.org/ and
http://zorked.net/smart/doc/README.html.
It is the first system I've encountered where I
*don't* fear
updates and actually (well, most of the time anyway) don't get
nasty surprises - especially on the stable version (unstable
moves a lot and does have surprises, testing moves and has
surprises only sometimes - like the upgrade from KDE 3.2 to
3.3 which did mess some things up for a while, i.e. uninstalls
3.2 on one run, and installs 3.3 only during one of the consequent
runs).
I'm the 'stable' guy, but Debian-stable is too outdated. Testing might
be OK. But it's not that I am afraid, it's just that it takes a lot of
work with Slackware.
With any RPM-based distro, I've had really nasty
stuff happening
with upgrades (changing distro version number, not securtiy
updates), and let's just not talk about proprietary systems.
There I'll grant you the fresh install right away.
I thought that SuSE was pretty painless, but I've always done a fresh
install because I always managed to uninstall it between 2 versions...
With Debian, I still keep a separate /home partition,
otherwise
I'm quite happy with apt. apt-get update; apt-get upgrade normally
gives me all I need.
Pacman (from ArchLinux) also seems easy to use. But even Slackware comes
with an automatic upgrade tool if you want to follow the current branch.
But my aim was to go from stable version 1 to stable version 2 on
several machines without downloading stuff more than once.
I'm pretty happy with Slackware, I am just thinking on how to do the
next upgrade more easily. I have a Python program in mind that, after
the upgrade, checks all major settings and corrects tbem automatically.
It could then be used on a fresh install and on an updated one, always
applying the same 'home-standard' settings.
Regards,
-pu