[PLUG] "Gender" issues

[Kyler Laird]

James B Newby <newbyjb@siu.edu> writes:

>I put debian on my main machine over the summer.  After using it for a 
>week or so, I put Slackware back on.  When I did apt-get update and 
>upgrade, it broke things.  Granted, I am told that I should have used 
>testing rather than unstable.

Ouch!  Yes, "unstable" is not necessarily stable.
As I'm often told "Wait a day and it'll be fixed."

(I use unstable and have been pleased with it.)

>	Another complaint I have is that the advanced package management tool, (I 
>forget what it's called) is not very intuative, and it seemed to be 
>overly tedious.  I had to go with the less-advanced install.  There 
>didn't seem to be an option to just install EVERYTHING like there is in 
>Slack.  As a result, I couldn't compile tarballs (as I am apt to do), 
>unless I hunted down and installed all the proper dev packages, which 
>was too tedious.  Have things changed?

I've run into the same problem, but it makes me
*really* appreciate Debian.  Package manipulation
requires only a name, not a complete URL (as with
Red Hat/Mandrake).

I have several machines that I personally maintain,
so I whipped up a script to dump all of the 
packages on a machine.  I can then feed it into 
"apt-get" on another machines and *poof* I have all
of the stuff I typically need.

It'd be trivial to install all of the -dev packages.
	apt-get install `apt-cache search -- -dev | cut -f1 -d\  | grep -- "-dev$"`

--kyler