coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Mark Stone <mark.stone@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/7/19 Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@xxxxxxxxx>:
>
> dpkg and rpm are (IMO) low-level tools that most users should not be
> using. The high-level ones are apt-get and yum. The high-level UI is
> the most important one.
>
> Olaf
>

I have a lot more experience with dpkg/apt than anything else, but I
have to disagree here. 90% of the time users are only going to be
dealing with apt, and even then it will be hidden behind a GUI like
synaptic. But certainly there are times when you want a package that
isn't in a repository, and where the developer has at least gone to
the trouble of making a package out of it. In these cases at least
you're going to be using dpkg directly.

There are problems with going this route, the main one being that the
user now assumes all responsibility for upgrading the package to newer
versions; this won't happen as a natural by-product of distro
management.

We should perhaps give a little thought to tools like alien as well,
that purport to let you use packages from one distro family (say,
rpm/Red Hat) in the other (dpkg/Debian). I'll note, though, that in my
personal experience alien is so absymally poor that you're almost
always going to have an easier time just grabbing the relevant source
and doing the config - make - make install dance.

-Mark


-- 
Mark  Stone || mark.stone@xxxxxxxxx || 253-223-2159
Co-author  and Editor, "Open Sources", "Open Sources 2.0"
Alumnus, VA Linux systems || Program Manager, Microsoft