On Thursday 05 Dec 2002 3:48 pm, Stephen Birch wrote: > I guess I don't get this. > > The advantage of debian over all other distributions is meant to be the > ease of upgrades. Indeed, it is VERY well done, the apt mechanism is a > beautiful piece of software engineering. > > So how come kde isn't trivial to upgrade?
It is. kde2 versions were trivial to upgrade, and when kde3 is in debian that will be a trivial upgrade too. KDE3 isnt in woody, so how can you possibly expect it to be easy? > In my new user naivety, I would have thought you could just add the kde.org > site to sources.list and apt-update/apt-upgrade. > > But I see a number of postings about all kinds of complicated issues. > > I gave it a try myself, and ended up with a horrible mess. > > What gives? Like i said, kde3 isnt in woody, its not even in unstable yet. Many people use it on woody and unstable without any problems. Im personally running kde 3.1 on unstable here and have never had any trouble with kde, bar a missing package which karolina fixed promptly once i had notified her. A package system is only as good as the packages available for it. In this respect debian beats the hell out of every other distro ive ever uses. Debian developers go to great lengths to produce good quality packages with sensible and acurate dependency information. I can apt-get distupgrade unstable every day without a hitch hardly ever. When i was trying to keep up with mandrake cooker (their equivalent of unstable) i was constantly having to force package installs as the dependency information was always being broken. Ive also never had a succesful upgrade between distribution versions of any mandrake or redhat release, but with debian it is simple. If your using packages not provided by debian developers as part of debian, you cant seriously expect there not to be issues, however most of the issues are incredibly simple to resolve, and people on these lists will go out of their way to help you. Tom
