The Great Package Management Experiment

The Great Package Management Experiment

Posted Sep 25, 2003 19:30 UTC (Thu) by stuart2048 (subscriber, #6241)
Parent article: The Great Package Management Experiment

I think this article was an interesting comparison when intalling a new package. Thanks guys!

But MPlayer is a very simple example. A lot of the hard parts of installing and upgrading did not get examined:
- what to do about existing user-modified config files
- starting/restarting daemons

On my RedHat 8 box, it seems an upgraded package installs its new config files with an extension .rpmnew -- and then leaves it up to the user to reconfigure them by hand. And don't forget to /etc/init.d/foo restart! You may also have to /sbin/chkconfig --add foo if this is a new package.

Gentoo provides etc-update to help me merge new config files with the old ones. For easy merges this is OK, but when there are large diffs then it's very cumbersome. I usually resort to merging diffs interactively in emacs using ediff. In Gentoo you are also responsible for /etc/init.d/foo restart.

So, it would be cool to see another article on this subject which compares solutions to some of these harder problems.

--Stuart

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