[PLUG] Re: Distro

[Rob Carlson <robcarlson@comcast.net>]

OK, my last words on the subject--  (Then again, a distro holy war could 
be fun...)

> > easy to administer, but how easy is it to keep up to date?  doesn't the
> > same lack of package management put more of a burden on the
> > administrator to keep up to date with security related information?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say an administrator should be keeping abreast of security issues and should be watching his or or her distro's site to see what up grades are available.  The issue then boils down to  "How easy is it to apply said upgrade/patches?"

> There are several choices with slackware, there's the upgradepkg route 
> if you obtain the necessary files, then type upgradepkg foobar1.tgz if 
> foobar.tgz isn't installed it doesn't upgrade.  There is also a setup 
> called swaret which after minor configuration will seek out a server and 
> find all of the packages on a Slackware system that need to be updated, 
> then allow you to choose whether or not to upgrade the packages. 
> Finally there's slapt/slapt-get which is basically a version of apt for 
> slackware.  Slackware does have packages and it has one directory where 
> a list of packages and all that is installed with the package is listed 
> so it's not as difficult as you imagine, it's just different.  I'm 
> another slackware user incidentally.

All of which are good ideas-- I've just been to lazy to install swaret.  What I do (which is mostly what swaret does) is just keep a slack-current directory with all my installed packages and rsync to a slack-current repository when I feel it's necessary . Then just upgradepkg *.tgz in applicable package directories.  This of course does not preclude grabbing an individual security package from some slack repository.

Generally I find that all server related packages that are part of the Slackware base install without a hitch, regardless of dependency checking.  (Pat is meticulous in that regard.)  The reason I pushed to run Slack as our Linux distro at work was because of the ease of server administration.  

One final note, if foobar1.tgz isn't installed, you can do upgradepkg --install-new and it will install.  This is a handy parameter for batch upgrades (i.e. upgrade what I have, install as new what I don't.)

(Real final note-- I have a grudge against Mandrake after it "fixed" my partition table for me once.  If you want RPMs, I'd say go with SuSE.)


___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug