Ubuntu 4.10

[Geert Janssens]

Eric Dunbar wrote:
> Is a package manager something that'll d/l and install an
> app/something from source?
> 
No, a package manager is a program that keeps track of which file gets 
installed where when you install a program, and which files of other 
packages are required for your program to work correctly.

That way, it can warn you if you try to overwrite files that were 
installed by other packages, or warn you if you try to delete a package 
that is required by another program.

MS Windows lacks such a package manager, which is the main cause of the 
famous "dll hell" on that operating system.

There are two major package systems: apt (debian's package manager), and 
rpm (redhat's package manager). There are others, like the package 
management system of Gentoo (emerge ?), or the various BSD systems 
(ports ?), but I don't know much about those.

Where you are getting confused is that rpm a few years ago was both a 
package manager, capable of what I described above, AND a tool to build 
packages from source, which could then be installed.

More recently, rpm has been split up into rpm and rpmbuild, to 
distinguish more clearly between the two functions.

Cheers,

Geert Jan

> Eric.
> 
> On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:45:34 -0500, Eric Dunbar <eric.dunbar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>I don't know that much about "package management" yet so I'll smile and nod.
>>
>>On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 09:07:17 -0500, Brian McKee
>><besomethingelse at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On Thursday, November 11, 2004, at 03:08  AM, R. McFarlane wrote:
>>>
>>>>        I had thought of installing Ubuntu but given that it can not
>>>>use existing package management files , that kind of puts me off. I
>>>>don't mind "rolling my own" (a.k.a. compiling from source) but to do
>>>>it for everything I want gets to be a lot of work. I much prefer yum!
> 
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