APT 2.0 Released For Debian Package Management

[Danielsan]

starshipeleven since the last two Debian editions, by default, Debian handles by itself the pinning toward official and unofficial (debian multimedia only) repositories; then if you use a third party repo you had better to setup manually the pin-priority in the apt preference to decide which repos has the priority toward overlapping libraries. I mean the issues with LMDE seems more a bad configuration from the Mint Team rather than an apt problem.

[starshipeleven]

starshipeleven since the last two Debian editions, by default, Debian handles by itself the pinning toward official and unofficial (debian multimedia only) repositories; then if you use a third party repo you had better to setup manually the pin-priority in the apt preference to decide which repos has the priority toward overlapping libraries. I mean the issues with LMDE seems more a bad configuration from the Mint Team rather than an apt problem.

That's the point, you need to go and edit text files ( /etc/apt/preferences) to decide priorities of each singular package you want to override the default repo priority. This is bs, we are in the 21st century, I'm sick of doing menial tasks like that.

OpenSUSE I can add repos and give them priorities, but zypper will also remember what packages I installed from what repo and will NOT pull down everything else is in that repo whenever it detects a higher version. It will just notify me "hey repo X has this package at higher version Y, this is the command to manually switch that package to that", while GUI tools don't even do that at all and assume I want to stay on the same repo when updating packages.

So it has "automatic package pinning" if we use Debian terminology.

I mean the issues with LMDE seems more a bad configuration from the Mint Team rather than an apt problem.

no, it had to do with the fact that it's Debian Testing so something might have packaging or dependency issues, and apt tends to freak out if that happens, or at least it did so back then.

There is no real configuration that changes how apt deals with broken dependencies, that's just its own algorithm for conflict resolution.

[NotMine999]

Apt isn't robust for shit, it relies too much on repos being perfect and transactions never failing when installing. Reality is different.

Plus it really sucks when you have multiple repos offering the same package at different versions.

Of course the rate of failures isn't very high, but when it fails it's a fun couple hours to fix the mess.

Also....

I've had apt try to delete half my system at least 3 times when I was using Linux Mint Debian with their normal repos

You obviously like to ignore the good advice given here -->> https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Please don't blame Debian for your "operator error".

[starshipeleven]

You obviously like to ignore the good advice given here -->> https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

That's not "good advice" that's working around issues with user training instead than solving them. I've got enough of that bs from Windows already, I'm sick of babysitting stuff that should really be able to deal with basic shit on its own.

Oh we don't need a rail here on this hole, let's just tell people to "lookout for holes and avoid them".

Please don't blame Debian for your "operator error".

Lol yeah sure. If just writing a fully Unix-phylosophy-compliant shell script that downloads, reads dependencies and installs manually stuff with dpkg always works fine and your package manager can't do that reliably if something is not PERFECT in the repositories or packages, your application is shit and you have to deal with it.

Maintainers and packagers are human and you need to account for human errors in there too.

[Danielsan]

That's the point, you need to go and edit text files ( /etc/apt/preferences) to decide priorities of each singular package you want to override the default repo priority. This is bs, we are in the 21st century, I'm sick of doing menial tasks like that.

This is the difference between a lean distro and a bloated distro, that's all.

[starshipeleven]

This is the difference between a lean distro and a bloated distro, that's all.

Debian a lean distro?
(laughing in Arch)

I guess people not man enough for Arch need some other place to call home, meanwhile OpenSUSE gets the same job done with zero effort on my part.

[Danielsan]

Debian a lean distro?
(laughing in Arch)

I guess people not man enough for Arch need some other place to call home, meanwhile OpenSUSE gets the same job done with zero effort on my part.

Arch is surely leaner than Debian but OpenSuse is more bloated than Ubuntu. Zero effort means you need to have all the services and features enabled by default because you need to catch all uses cases imaginable, with all the securities issues implied. By the way the issue was with LMDE, bad default setup supposedly, and with the non-sense to have a third party repos when they could just work directly on Debian and having a full cinnamon experience out of the box directly within it.

[starshipeleven]

Arch is surely leaner than Debian but OpenSuse is more bloated than Ubuntu.

Wrong.

Zero effort means you need to have all the services and features enabled by default

No it means that I only need a switch in a GUI to enable it, and for more complex things there is again a GUI (Yast) that guides the user through the process and auto-installs packages that are not there in the default install.

Also the process of adding a new third party repo or package is simplified and relies on the GUI taking a file from the OBS (the repository for all third party stuff, similar to AUR or PPAs) and guiding you through the process.

You can also still do stuff manually by editing files if you want, the GUI actually parses the same config files and will not delete your manual changes.

With Debian you always need to look up some manual to know what you need to write and where, because there is no way you remember something you did ONCE like 5 years ago.

By the way the issue was with LMDE,

No it was with Debian Testing and I'm sure of that because the packages that broke everything were from that repo, not from LMDE. I've been running 100% pure Debian Testing for a long while before LMDE and it does sometimes try to delete your desktop environment because some packages require dependencies that aren't landed yet in the repo or something like that.

This happens time to time in Tumbleweed, but the package manager (on CLI) is smart enough to warn you and recommend to abort the transaction, while if run by GUI it automatically aborts that transaction and updates other stuff only.

I'd like to point out that other Debian derivatives also had similar issues with broken packages (OpenMediaVault), but that's actually genuinely on them (specifically the community plugin repo), the dev team there kind of sucks.
But there apt's assumptions made troubleshooting and fixing the system much harder than it would be on OpenSUSE where I would not have gotten in that hole in the first place.

and with the non-sense to have a third party repos when they could just work directly on Debian and having a full cinnamon experience out of the box directly within it.

This is not freedom, "stay with the family or else"...

[Danielsan]

Debian is built to use its own repositories if you start to use third party repos and PPA it is fair that something may get broken, but Debian doesn't get broken by itself you can safely use "apt upgrade" and it doesn't overwrite anything and keep the older packages, but if you use "apt full-upgrade" it removes and updates libraries and you may have some dependencies issues that usually are resolved in a couple of days.

Debian repositories must follow some rules, if you have third party repos that doesn't follow the specification you do it at you own risk (PPA are such pain), and having a GUI and something that recognizes a third party repo and treats it as such it means having a service active listening for this scope, and for me this means being bloated.

[starshipeleven]

Debian is built to use its own repositories

Yeah this explains why Debian Testing can break just because some packages might be missing for a short while. Are you aware of what Debian Testing is?

but Debian doesn't get broken by itself you can safely use "apt upgrade" and it doesn't overwrite anything

Unless it decides that to satisfy some dependency it has to downgrade some packages and then delete half of the system

Debian repositories must follow some rules,

Which are sometimes broken in their own repos too

and having a GUI and something that recognizes a third party repo and treats it as such it means having a service active listening for this scope,

zypper is not a GUI application nor an "active service" and is not "listening" for anything, OpenSUSE has text files with repo lists too just like Debian.
It's just that the CLI package manager is able to do package pinning on its own either automatically or by asking you to pick what you want from a list of possible actions, without requiring you to edit files manually.

OpenSUSE adds GUI and management stuff on top, but it's largely tangential, the discussion here is about apt vs zypper (the two package managers).