[kwlug-disc] is it just me, or is debian package management painful?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
>        case in point:  i have a .deb file sitting in front of me, on the
>       system.  i want to install it, and have the process automatically go
>       out and grab the deps for it.  AFAICT, no single command for that.
>
> I don't know about your specific case, but dpkg is at a very low
> level down the .deb chain. Higher level tools are the ones that
> should be used to resolve dependencies and install what is needed.
> By using dpkg, you are going down to a low level.

  i realize that.  and i'm still unsure as to how to do what i
described above.  is there a way?

>        similarly, i have the .deb file of a newer version for a package
>       that's already installed.  how to upgrade using that, again with deps
>       being handled automagically?  no idea.
>
> For me, on production systems, I want to stay with whatever is in
> the repository, because that is tested together as a whole and
> dependencies, compatibilities are resolved.  

  and, again, that doesn't answer my question.  i appreciate that
there may be things i want to do that are arcane and obscure, but i
don't think the above operations qualify.  i think they're pretty
straightforward.  and i don't see how to do them.

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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