2011/7/19 Olaf van der Spek <olafvds...@gmail.com>: > > 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.st...@gmail.com || 253-223-2159 Co-author and Editor, "Open Sources", "Open Sources 2.0" Alumnus, VA Linux systems || Program Manager, Microsoft _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers Post to : coapp-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
