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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> Synaptic uses its own logic to decide which packages to install/upgrade
> and from what sources, separate from apt-get's.

That would have been my guess.  This has also been true in the past when
you used full-screen (ncurses) aptitude and invoke its apt-get method,
as well as the old dselect tool, and probably also kpackage.

I happen to have found extremely good the logic internal to apt-get when
used in the customary way.  It can also be tweaked to comply with
individual preferences via various /etc/apt/* files (apt.conf,
preferences).  

> PCLinuxOS is RPM-based and originally Mandriva-derived...

Yes, I was well aware of that, too, making me additionally wonder why
Texstar's views about PCLinuxOS maintenance were being (slightly mis-)
quoted on a mailing list for the benefit of an Ubuntu user.  (Since you
mentioned that.  I wasn't going to.)

> ...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.

If I were running PCLinuxOS, which I'm not, I'd probably try it both
ways (e.g., in VMs) and make up my own mind.

Debian devlopers used to recommend dselect.  That was not good.
Then they recommended aptitude.  That was not good.

As I mentioned, I arrived at my views through long experience.  Other
people are welcome to make up their own damned minds, even if it means
following advice they don't quite understand concerning a distribution
irrelevant to the question posed.

As as aside, Texstar did _not_ say anything in particular would break
his distro.  He deprecated 'apt-get update and apt-get upgrade',
recommended the Synaptic front-end to apt-get, and said if people _did_
want to use apt-get they should do 'apt-get update and apt-get
dist-upgrade'.  Please note the difference between the two command
strings.