apt-get [LWN.net]

apt-get

Posted Nov 6, 2003 1:03 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589)
Parent article: Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

You left out apt-get. apt-get is the most valuable system administration tool I've ever used. Of course, it isn't just the tool, but also the whole Debian process which provides a very large number of well-maintained packages with proper interpackage dependencies.

I expect to read lots of comments from people in the next few months saying "Hi! I installed Debian last week and OH MY GOD HOW HAVE I SURVIVED THIS LONG WITHOUT apt-get!".

(I never used Red Hat > 7.3, so maybe Red Hat recently grew some apt-get-like functionality of which I am unaware.)

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apt-get

Posted Nov 6, 2003 2:00 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

apt-get is available for Red Hat.

apt-get

Posted Nov 6, 2003 5:51 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (subscriber, #7544) [Link]

yes, but rh+apt-get is still crappy compared to debian.

I think this is down to people attributing all of debians package installation nice-ness to apt-get, but in fact it's the package maintainers that deserve the credit.

Debian has every conceivable package in it's repositry, so you don't have to install third party packages, so your favourite packages work together and don't conflict.

apt-get

Posted Nov 6, 2003 2:40 UTC (Thu) by ladislav (guest, #247) [Link]

I did list "unmatched package installation and upgrade infrastructure" as one of the advantages. As any Debian developer will tell you, it is not just apt-get - after all apt-get has now been ported to RPM-based distributions too. It is the Debian's strictly enforced packaging policy that makes all the difference.

debconf

Posted Nov 6, 2003 16:15 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link]

Absolutely! And apt-get is not where it ends. Debconf, which can be thought of as "configuration wizards done right", exists only in Debian, and makes maintenance and upgrading of config files and other options for many packages totally pain-free. It is one of many Debian advantages.

config4gnu (mentioned at the link above) is trying to do this for many distros/OSes, but has been stalled at an early and unreleasable stage for many months...