[PLUG] "Gender" issues

[Jeff DeFouw]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2001, Nels Tomlinson wrote:

> I've been wondering about debian.  The auto-upgrade feature of aptget 
> sounds great, but how practical is it over a (painfully slow, with 
> Purdue as the isp) dialup connection?  I have visions of turning aptget 
> loose and seeing my connection cut off three hours later after getting 
> half of the first package downloaded ... time after time after time.

apt-get has built-in auto-resume and a configurable number of retries.  
If your connection dies in the middle of a download it will save what it
has.  I think I've seen it force a time out too but I'm not sure.  If it
fails to download something (and doesn't hang on a connection?) it will
continue with other files and abort at the end.  Then you can run it again
to get what it missed.  You'll likely not want to run it on a dialup while
doing other interactive net things.

> Does it work with a local mirror, so that I could burn a copy from 
> csociety in one of the pucc labs and carry it home

You can copy it from cerias and point apt-get to the cerias mirror.

> If I don't like an upgrade, will it downgrade automatically?

It stores all the packages it downloads in a directory.  You can
optionally tell it to never automatically delete anything.  If something
breaks and you don't want to wait or fix it, you can locate an older
version previously downloaded and use the dpkg tool to install it.  
apt-get doesn't downgrade.  Old packages are not kept on the debian
mirrors, unless you wanted to jump back to what's in stable, so you need a
local copy somehow if you want to downgrade to something recent.

--
Jeff DeFouw <defouwj@purdue.edu>