Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

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Dependencies. Conflicts with.

Unavailable dependencies from mirrors.

Girlfriends OpenSUSE for example ran fine for a few months and now its stuck in an infinite update/upgrade loop or whatever it is trying to do - I really dont have the time to look into it. But the problem is, zypper cant update but really wants to update. Most likely it is conflicts between different repositories, or unavailable shit from some repository. But how useful would OpenSUSE be without the ability to play mp3 files?

So all her programs are now outdated, getting older and older.

Ive seen the same on most .deb based distros Ive tried - failure to update/upgrade a package or collection of packages - breaks the entire system.

Oh you ran apt-get install something previously? Well now that failed, and I will not let you continue until you resolve the issue, the other package will be REMOVED, and the current package cannot be installed, but for an update is who the fuck cares stfu ragequit* * (installs archlinux).

Well put, that mirrors my experience. A year or two ago (recent history), I had an issue where I tried to install a 32-bit package on a 64-bit system accidentally. apt (or apt-get, or deb, or gdebi, or aptitude, or synaptic, or Software Update, or Software Center, or something else, I forget which one) detected conflicts and the default action had I pressed enter would have been to uninstall every 64-bit package on the system that conflicted with that 32-bit package or any of its many dependencies. That's not sane. Hopefully they've fixed this by now.

> Hopefully they've fixed this by now.

ha. ha ha ha. so many things in effing all distros that are complete and utter ux fuster clucks.

I've had apt-related troubles in the past, but they almost always were caused by the use of custom repositories/PPAs.

Further, it might seem arcane to have to type "apt-get install -f" to install dependencies for an autonomous .deb package, but I'm not sure how different that is from having to learn, for example, the myriad switches for pacman.

> the myriad switches for pacman.

Pacman doesnt leave me with a broken package-manager when a package fails to install. For example

pacman -S thatprogram

and if it fails, then next time I do pacman -S otherpgoram or pacman -Syu

it goes fine, there is nothing from thatprogram which complains or bugs me. Unlike Ubuntu/Debian where

apt-get install fail

and thus everything I try to do now will fail unless I resolve the fail.

pacman also has far less switches, at least I know only of -Q -Qs -S -Ss -Sy -U and -Ql | grep for something Im looking for. Thats all I need to know really. Like 4 or 5 switches/commands.

But look at apt,

apt-get {things here but not search!} {ugh so many switchs here} apt-{what its not really called search!?} dpkg-{jesus-christ-so-many-options}

> and thus everything I try to do now will fail unless I resolve the fail.

This is exactly why I detest apt.

Our products at my last company ran Ubuntu and Mint. I detested dealing with the package manager.

I wrote so much stuff to get around apt when dealing with software packages. I wrote a Maven-based update system (with user-friendly wrappers) for pulling down updates on customer units, and my boss wrote an SVN-based solution for internal dev work. I wrote our own validation system to determine if a package can be safely installed, and if it passed, it'd get shoved in with dpkg -i --force-all, because I didn't trust dpkg to do it itself. I wrote a meta-package system (basically a tarball of debs + a manifest file) so I could guarantee atomic installation (read the manifest, verify every deb in the metapackage, and abort before installing anything if even a single package fails verification).

> pacman also has far less switches, at least I know only of -Q -Qs -S -Ss -Sy -U and -Ql | grep for something Im looking for. Thats all I need to know really. Like 4 or 5 switches/commands.

-Qo is pretty useful, too.

> Ive seen the same on most .deb based distros Ive tried - failure to update/upgrade a package or collection of packages - breaks the entire system.

Which means you didn't try Debian stable. deb based or not doesn't matter, all that matters is distribution policies on packaging, migrations and releases.

Havent tried Debian stable, but then again, I dont live in 1999 either.

What is the nginx version for Debian stable, is it even in the repositories yet?

> Havent tried Debian stable, but then again, I dont live in 1999 either.

> What is the nginx version for Debian stable, is it even in the repositories yet?

It's none of my business to stop you from hating Debian. Just don't blame ".deb based distros" as if them being deb based was the reason of your suffering.

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