Yet Another Error [LWN.net]

Yet Another Error

Posted Sep 19, 2003 2:33 UTC (Fri) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
Parent article: Revisiting RPM Package Management

Debian has had dependency resolution since well before the arrival of APT. dselect has an awkward interface and other flaws, and may not meet all of the rather arbitrary list of features the author has for an advanced package manager (I can't for the life of me recall if there was any support for adding non-distro repositiories before apt), but it certainly did handle dependencies - that was a huge part of the reason Debian won my personal comparison (Slackware, which I has been using, Red Hat 4.something, and Debian) back in 1997. Or was that 1996?

Of course, especially compared to Slackware, Debian had so much more stuff "built in" that I didn't even think about nonstandard repositories for quite a while. :-)

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Yet Another Error

Posted Sep 21, 2003 23:28 UTC (Sun) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

Debian has had dependency resolution since well before the arrival of APT.

Absolutely. I started using Debian in I think 1996, and dependency resolution already worked just fine. We all know Debian has been ahead of the pack in this regard, but it's nothing short of amazing just how far ahead it was - how long it took the other major distributions to gain this fundamental feature (well, it is said SuSE has had a similar feature for awhile, but I don't know the details of that).

(I can't for the life of me recall if there was any support for adding non-distro repositiories before apt)

Certainly you could - the infrastructure was there, and I can't think of a technical reason why not - but I don't think third-party repositories were very popular back in the day.

Debian had so much more stuff "built in" that I didn't even think about nonstandard repositories for quite a while. :-)

Yeah, and up to this day that's why third-party repositories are a lot less important in Debian than in most other Linux distributions. Most free software tends to get into Debian unstable before you even hear of it.