apt, deity, dpkg, aptitude history
Hi all,
I am hoping to put up a blog post about
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/The_past_year_in_APT.webm
. So I'm using the blog post as an excuse to know a little more
history about Debian.
Warning - the e-mail below would be a bit long and probably full of
errors of omission and commission.
I am the guy which shared about his experience in Debian
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/My_Experience_with_Debian.webm
. A bit of context here, I don't have Computer Science background but
learnt Commerce (or very basics of Business Fundamentals) as my
learning so probably my understanding leaves much to be desired.
One of the things I forgot to mention during that sharing is that
during my experiences with rpm-based distributions I had seen but not
understood that 'rpm was broken/borkecd' . The only thing I knew is
whenever I tried to update/upgrade anything in the rpm world, the
distribution would break in weird ways. I had no idea of dependencies
and conflicts, just used to know that something was not right and
hence was hopping from one distribution to another after every few
months to a year or so.
Similar to many people, Ubuntu was my introduction to the deb side of
things and quickly came to know apt-get and aptitude intimately but
somehow aptitude was what I favored and specifically 'aptitude
safe-upgrade' which I still use to this date. I was under the
benign/naive idea that these tools were made by Ubuntu/Canonical and
only much later I came to know that it's in fact Debian which does
much of the work. In that sense, I would be forever grateful to
Ubuntu/Canonical for introducing me to the deb Universe.
Coming to my question what I've been trying to figure out is when the
project/distribution started have repository updates and being able to
upgrade in-place and using which tool to do that ?
I had a look at
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianHistory
and
http://gabriellacoleman.org/debian-history-roundtable-discussion/
It has this -
"Ean: You see, I remember when I was first started using Debian the
thing that sold me, it was definitely after the package infrastructure
but it was still pretty early. But things were working enough, that I
was running Slackware and I had done like two backup my home directory
and reinstalled Slackware from scratch and copies my home directory
back onto it. And then I heard from Usenet, “Woah, Debian is the
thing, it actually works. You can upgrade it in place and it was like
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”
[laughter]
It was like: “holy fuck, you can upgrade in place!”
When did that work?
Joey Hess: [He answered something but he has such a deep voice I could
not understand].
Ian: The upgrade in place worked almost immediately and you know what
is funny? It was an accident.
[laughter]." -
http://gabriellacoleman.org/debian-history-roundtable-discussion/
But when this happened (as in year and tool) is not told/shared.
For e.g. I had a look at changelog.gz of dpkg, dselect and apt and
while apt has the history since it's initial release, both dpkg and
dselect do not.
I also had a look at the man page of apt, dselect and dpkg to see if
any historical documentation was there in the man-page of both the
packages but was unable to find anything.
I had a look at the mail discussions of '97 and '98 (on deity and
debian-dpkg mailing lists) to see if I could piece together the
history from the very basic/simple sys-admin perspective, the basic -
a. update index from the archive.
b. know what packages can be upgraded
c. the updates, their dependencies and any conflicts
d. Removal of packages which are no longer in the archive along with
their configuration files and no files re left behind.
e. Doing the actual installation and seeing the pre-and-post
installation scripts as advertised. (which works 99.99% of the time on
my workstations.)
There probably are more steps but I'm sharing the ones which come to my mind.
AFAIK dpkg never got the understanding of a remote repository and
index update ( at least the man page makes no mention of either) as
it's a low-level tool.
While the modern apt, aptitude, aptitude and dselect have the update
index option in one way or the other. From the discussions over
mailing lists if my understanding is right, dselect (along with some
tools of dpkg like dpkg -C perhaps ? ) was the first/original tools
which were used by a potential system-administrator to make sure that
her/is system is up-to-date vis-a-vis whatever debian published as
updates. I am guessing this was in 1997 or before as there doesn't
seem to be a way to access old changelogs of dselect/dpkg and only
email discussions .
But it seems that dselect had some problems and that's why deity was
supposed to be a tool and then apt, apt-get and aptitude. Could
somebody tell/share if this is correct or if not how things
progressed. From my findings so far -
dselect and dpkg -> deity, apt, aptitude and apt-get ( I do not know
whether deity was a tool in itself at sometime or whether it got
born/re-born as apt or was it a project space, something akin to what
alioth provides to DD today.)
https://lists.debian.org/deity/1997/09/msg00000.html - "I just tried
to get diety to use egcs," - Jason .
>From the mail it seems to be some sort of compiling tool - Also from
his To address - Deity Creation Team <deity@lists.debian.org> which
seems to say it was a tool.
Another query - I have been following apt for quite some years and
even though it has some limitations (safe-upgrade not being there) it
seems it has been quite active in the last 2-3 years at least. It also
seems to have had an impact on aptitude development also as David K.
has also become a bit more active. Is my sense of things on the
correct/right track or am I off the mark ?
Sorry for the longish mail, hopefully somebody is able to make sense
of the disjointed ramblings and have some reply which I could use
(maybe in the blog post) but certainly will be a correction or
addition to things not known to relatively newcomers like me.
Look forward to hearing from all.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A 2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8
Reply to: