On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 11:17:45AM -0500, Lamar Owen wrote: > On Thursday 17 January 2008, Michael Schwendt wrote: > > Debian and Ubuntu try to offer "everything" in their official repos. > > Still there are so many unofficial repos, I have doubts they all work > > together always. It's very likely that some of them are even mutually > > exclusive, e.g. see a long list at: http://www.apt-get.org/main.php > > Interesting. Didn't know about apt-get.org. > > Browsing that list gave me a laugh, though. Debian Potato indeed. > > I didn't see any repository listed there that is as extensive as, say, ATrpms > is. > > I didn't take the time to look at every repo listed there, but a cursory skim > indicates that most are small, and none replace core packages that I could > see. I think this is the main difference indeed: most of the additional Debian repositories only offer a single program or a set of related programs. Whereas if you configure livna for e.g. kernel modules, you get access to a lot of multimedia applications too, which may interfere with applications from e.g. freshrpms. On the other hand, dependency problems may occur on Debian too, and for the same reasons, eg I expect that vlc and mplayer can be installed from the separate repositories mentioned on apt-get.org, but they may have some dependencies in common, and who knows what happens then. Or now that qmail's license has changed, it may find its way into Debian's main repository. But will that be a clean upgrade for people using one of the repositories that provides qmail now? Who knows? Maybe the other thing that makes the problems saller on Debian: I see a lot more packagenames with version numbers there, so that is basically the compatibility library approach. The resulting system may have a lot more old libraries, and it may be difficult to figure out which old packages are no longer needed, but there is a better chance of getting a random package from some 3rd party repository to work. David Jansen
