On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Chad Walstrom wrote: > On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 05:58:50AM -0500, Daniel Taylor wrote: > > 3. Debian developers got upgrading right a while ago, so they aren't > > as concerned with getting the installer improved. > > Not quite right. Debian developers HATE the current installation floppy > setup. Let me restate, debian developers DESPISE the current > installation floppy setup. It's monolithic, extremely hard to maintain, > and has to be custom designed for each architecture it's deployed on. > Yep, and has had several replacements pop up over time (Stormix?). My point was actually that there is little need to ever REinstall a Debian system, so the installer gets less field time than dselect or apt. > > > That said, has anyone here seen work on a source-based apt front end > > for Debian? > > Hmm... There was talk on debian-devel about such a thing. You mean > something like a BSD ports functionality w/o going so far as to needing > ports? Recently, *.deb's have been required to add "Build-Depends:" > fields for the tools and libraries that a package needs to build from > source. apt-get does have a "source" target that downloads the > necessary files and applies the debian patch to the original tarball in > a working directory. Read the apt-get manpages for more details. I use "apt-get -b source pine" to keep up to date. I was rather thinking of a frontend like aptitude or dselect that actually acknowledged and used the Sources to keep track of packages. -- Daniel Taylor dante at plethora.net