debian package management

[Fraser Campbell]

On Monday 19 April 2004 13:51, Mark Wadden wrote:

> Without sparking a religious war here, I'd like to know what people
> think of Debian's package upgrade process, compared to say Red Hat
> Network or SuSE's YaST/YOU.

I've been a fairly long time so my opinion is very biased and I don't have 
much (or favourable) experience with other distros, you have been warned.  At 
my current employer (hi guys ;-) they were staunch redhat users for the past 
3 years when I arrived it felt like going from a 911 to a Pinto, thankfully 
they now use Debian _everywhere_ given a choice.

My first Debian install was an all-in-one jobbie that ran an entire ISP.  This 
was sometime in 1997 (or perhaps early 1998).  It was a web server, mail 
server, ftp server, radius server and (probably) a few other things that I'd 
rather forget.

When it came time to upgrade from Debian 2.0 (hamm) the procedure (from my 
short memory) was to download and run a shell script.  The shell script took 
care of a few things including preparing the system to run apt.  With apt 
installed it was then "apt-get update &&  apt-get dist-upgrade".

I upgraded this machine in the middle of the afternoon while the ISP continued 
to go about it's business.   There were probably about 70 people dialed into 
the ISP (and using pop, smtp, radius, web, etc.)  at the time that I upgraded 
the one and only server  The upgrade didn't take very long and each service 
was only unavailable for brief periods as packages were upgraded and services 
restarted.


> I've always been one to just reinstall for a major upgrade instead of
> attempting to merge versions (i.e. going from RH7.3 to 9.0) but hearing
> things like "You'll never have to reinstall again!" sounds promising.

The only reinstall I recall enjoying was when I repeatedly installed slackware 
on the first Pentium I ever got my hands on ... I remember laughing giddly at 
how fast the packages zipped from cdrom to hard drive ;-)  I rarely reinstall 
these days.


> Question is, does it really hold up?  Does it leave a mess behind?

In my experience it holds up.  In my experience it leaves no mess.  Would I be 
as reckless with an upgrade these days as with the hamm->slink upgrade I 
described before, _definitely_ not!  When I upgrade a critical machine these 
days I would ensure that I had a fully tested upgrades on a spare machine 
first and that I was fully aware of changes that occurred in critical server 
software to be ready for config changes as appropriate.  I would do the 
upgrades during off-peak or zero-use periods, I would be very careful that I 
had a fully verified and completely up-to-date backup, I would even consider 
a reinstall in some circumstances ;-)

Debian packages ensure that the upgrades are smooth processes.  If a package 
upgrade is not likely to be smooth or might not be desirable then multiple 
packages are often provided (xfree 3.x & 4.x, kernel 2.2 & 2.4 & 2.6, bind 8 
& bind 9, apache 1.3 & 2.x, multiple library versions, etc.).

What I detest about redhat is that they give you little flexibility ... kernel 
will be 2.4 or 2.6 only, apache will be 2.x only, mta will be sendmail 
(perhaps they've finally heard of postfix now), bind will be 9.x, perl will 
be 5.8, python will be 2.3.  Upgrades sometimes like to leave you with 
crippled configs (.rpmsave, .rpmorig, .rpmwhatever).  I could go on but I'd 
better stop ;-)

Suse I won't comment on since I've never used it, some people seem to think 
that I should try it now that Novell owns it but I just don't see the 
point ;-)

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml