Re: help with installation

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Laura Conrad <address@hidden> writes:

> I had that idea too.   I agree that the Debian package manager
> probably works better than the RPM stuff (not rpm itself, but urpmi
> and the graphical version).

Maybe it does, maybe not, it depends on what you want.  dpkg and rpm
are both fine pkg managers.  You must realise that when moving to
Debian, you may have to relearn quite some things/dislearn and
dislearn some redhad-ism you've become used to.

> Unfortunately, no package manager can work any better than the
> information given it by the package maintainers, and Debian seems to
> get even less testing of its individual packages than Mandrake does.

I don't think Debian does much qa testing if any.  The quality of
individual packages seems to be very much the responsibility of the
actual maintainer (and of the quality of the bug reports).  In most
cases this turns out very well.

The good thing is, that if you're missing a dependency, you can be
sure that the missing package is in the archive too; you don't have to
go googling the internet for it.

> Or at least that is the conclusion I come to based on the fact that
> upgrading from the current stable to the current testing version
> caused me not to be able to get into X because the default font
> wasn't installed.

You just had some bad luck, but you were asking for it.  If you're
tracking testing or unstable, you're using experimental stuff; you
may experience this kind of problem maybe twice a year or more.

The main practical advantage of Debian, imo, is that it has so many
packages, including all their dependencies.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org