APT-GET is rabbit-dung ... please confirm/deny

[Stefan Bruda]

Hi.

I hereby confirm (rabbit-dung that is). :-)

At 08:27 +1300 on 2002-12-6 Bernard Mentink wrote:
 >
 > >As a result of your action, apt- will have lots of problems with 
 > >dependancies ...

Agreed, but if I have to choose between a system to my liking (or even
fully functional at times, as in Bernard's case) and the use of
appt-get, guess what I choose. ;-) In this respect --nodeps works
great for me, although it is not always necessary (see below).

 > I tried to remove my distro version of Ghostscript with rpm -e, but it
 > complained about dependancies. Since there is no documentation
 > on how to remove those dependancies apart from the -nodeps option, I fail to
 > see the what else I could have done .... please enlighten me to the correct
 > procedure.

This is ugly, but it sometimes works (more often than your procedure
as a matter of fact): Do not do rpm -e, just install the tarball over
the RPM-installed files.  Make sure that --prefix is given correctly
when you configure the sources (so that the RPM files are indeed
overwritten).  This way, RPM thinks that it still has the old version
installed, and you should be in principle able to use appt-get to
upgrade other packages.  Of course, if you "upgrade" through appt-get
the package you just overwritten, you will have to reinstall it from
sources.

You could also try to install everything you build from sources in
/usr/local and then make sure that /usr/local/bin comes before
/usr/bin in your path (/usr/local/X11R6/bin before /usr/X11R6/bin,
etc.), and that LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set as desired. Of course, this is
highly inconvenient, since you have to chase PATH definitions all over
the place (to say nothing about wasting disk space for two versions of
the same thing).

I personally hate the appt-get thing, exactly because it is too
patronizing: it works great when all your system is standard (and in
particular it works great for newbies I guess), but as soon as you do
something out of ordinary chances are it will no longer work.  In the
rare occasions when I have to install something from RPM I don't
actually use appt-get, I rather prefer to go to the ftp site, download
the RPMs that I need, and then do rpm -Uvh.  I also prefer to install
from sources whenever I can.

I am aware of the possibility to build an RPM packages from sources
and then install the result, and this might just be the best way
around.  But then I did not have time to investigate how to do it.
Maybe somebody knowledgeable could summarize the procedure here?

Stefan

-- 
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as
it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass