[sf-lug] NEED INFO ABOUT BOOT SECTOR, SPACE LIMITS

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Tue, 2017-08-01 at 16:32 -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Tom Turner (seameadowlake at gmail.com):
> 
> > Thanks Rick.
> > 
> > On the issue of Texstar's update recommendations,
> 
> What he says is 'DO NOT USE apt-get update and apt-get upgrade from the
> command line. This has never been recommended.'  
> 
> But he didn't say why.
> 
> And, moreover, as mentioned, Synaptic merely runs apt-get in order to
> actually, y'know, do anything.
> 
> I cannot be bothered to figure out the fine details of what PCLinuxOS
> does (and please note that the discussion upthread was _not_ about
> PCLinuxOS at all!), but the likeliest action it takes is precisely what 
> Texstar recommends to users of apt-get, which is 'apt-get update and
> apt-get dist-upgrade', which would be a normal usage model.
> 
> So, after a long walk, it appears that Texstar for unexplained reasons
> has no problem with what the apt-get utility does when used in that ordinary
> fashion, but for unstated reasons would prefer PCLinuxOS users -- which,
> again, does not include the upthread querent, who uses Ubuntu -- to 
> do (very likely) exactly the same thing with exactly the same tools from
> behind a graphical front-end.  Why?  Maybe he just doesn't want
> PCLinuxOS users loose with a general-purpose tool and wants them more
> precisely guided by a front-end that corrals the admin a bit better and
> does only specific things.  Maybe something else.  You could ask him.
> Or not.
> 
> My recommendations were based on very long years of using the tools at
> home and at work.  Yours, albeit of course well intentioned, was based
> on your loosely paraphrasing a rather cryptic, unexplained view
> expressed by the maintainer of a distribution the querent isn't even
> using.
> 
> Still, I thank you.

Synaptic uses its own logic to decide which packages to install/upgrade
and from what sources, separate from apt-get's. To the casual user, the
results are usually the same when the distro is Debian or Ubuntu and not
a downstream derivative of them, but PCLinuxOS is RPM-based and
originally Mandriva-derived, so if one of their maintainers says that
doing $FOO will break things on that distro, then within the context of
that distro, I'd bet they're 110% right.