this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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New to Linux? Ubuntu Isn’t Your Only Option (www.howtogeek.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Ubuntu's popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I've highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Apt is the greatest package manager ever built.

Urgh, no, it's not. Everything about it is super crusty if you go beyond simply installing packages and adding others' PPAs IMO.

  1. Packages often enable the services they install right away. Someone told me they got locked out over SSH because they installed a firewall package that locked everything down by default, and the service got started on install. I guess that's technically more of an issue with the way things are packaged rather than the package manager itself, though.
  2. To temporarily install a package (so that it will get uninstalled with the next autoremove) you need to use aptitude to install the package, or run apt-mark auto after installing (which will also clear the manually installed flag if it was manually installed before), apt has no syntax for it.
  3. dpkg-scanpackages is eternally slow, I had to write a wrapper for it that runs it separately for every package and caches the result because I didn't want to wait multiple minutes for it to rebuild the PPA package index
  4. The standard packaging tools (dh-make or debuild, I think I've looked at both) are insane, so much so that I gave up and wrote something that takes files similar to Arch PKGBUILDs which calls dpkg-deb at the very end.

I could probably list more but I haven't had to touch apt in a while, thankfully. But it is probably the #1 reason I avoid anything Debian-based. #2 is probably their Frankenstein sysvinit/systemd setup.

I do have to say that apt remove vs purge is pretty cool though.

What do you like about it?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Packages often enable the services they install right away.

That's a problem of the package, not the package manager.

Generally this fits with Debian's philosophy. But regardless I think it's out-of-scope for why Apt is good. You could make a distro with Apt and not have your packages do this.

To temporarily install a package [...]

I'm not talking about apt the CLI tool, but the actual package manager. The plain apt tool is only designed to be a convenience wrapper for common workflows implemented in other tools.

As you correctly pointed out, Apt has the distinction between packages installed as a dependency ("auto installed") versus packages installed directly ("manually installed"). This is precisely one of the reasons why I consider Apt the best package manager. (Yes, I know other package managers can do this, not all though.)

If you want to install a package as manual, then later mark it as auto, you can do that with apt-mark.

dpkg-scanpackages is eternally slow.

Are you maintaining a PPA for others?

Frankly, I've never run into this problem.

The standard packaging tools [...] are insane.

dh_make helps you create a package that adheres to Debian policy, and there is good reason for Debian to have those policies. But if you're just packaging something yourself, you don't have to use it. It's just a template for new packages.

At the end of the day, all you really need to create a deb is to create two files debian/control and debian/rules. These are the equivalent to a PKGBUILD. The control file specifies all of the dependency metadata, and the rules file contains the install script.

The difference in packaging philosophy is that PKGBUILDs are external and they download the upstream sources. On the other hand, in Debian, they rehost the upstream package and add the debian directory. This means that building Debian packages is mostly hermetic: you don't need access to the network.

What do you like about it?

Mostly that it makes super useful distinctions between concepts. But there are other goodies.

  • Manually installed versus auto installed.
  • Uninstalled versus purged.
  • Upgrade versus Dist Upgrade.
  • Dependency versus suggestion versus recommendation.
  • The alternatives system.
  • Pinning, and relatedly that packages can include version constraints in their dependencies.
  • Interactive configuration at install time.
  • Support for both source and binary packages.

I also do appreciate that Debian pre-configures packages to work together with the same set of conventions out of the box. But again, that's a property of the packages, not of Apt.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I’m not talking about apt the CLI tool, but the actual package manager. The plain apt tool is only designed to be a convenience wrapper for common workflows implemented in other tools.

Sure, but the interface is probably just as important as the actual logic behind it, isn't it?

As you correctly pointed out, Apt has the distinction between packages installed as a dependency (“auto installed”) versus packages installed directly (“manually installed”). This is precisely one of the reasons why I consider Apt the best package manager.

Honestly I would consider that one of the fundamental things a package manager must do, I didn't think it was a special thing haha

If you want to install a package as manual, then later mark it as auto, you can do that with apt-mark.

Yeah, I know. But if you want to manually install a package like that, you have to remember the extra step after it's finished installing instead of before the install. It's just unergonomic, for something that could be a flag (e.g. in emerge -1) and that I at least use fairly often.

Another problem with it being a two-step thing is that if you do it unconditionally in a script, it doesn't retain the flag from before the previous installation command, you need a third step, i.e. checking if the package was installed before. My use case for this was installing dependencies for a package build which should be able to be removed again afterward, while not affecting the subset that were already installed explicitly.

Now that I think about it, it's probably a good idea to always check if a package needs to be installed before installing it if you script it, though, because otherwise it might be unnecessarily reinstalled. Fair enough.

Are you maintaining a PPA for others?

Yeah, I maintain some software/config/meta packages for the computers at the uni I study at. Before, I'm pretty sure the packages were manually packaged with every update and I wanted to automate it a bit and also make clear how to get from the source tarballs to the final build.

On the other hand, in Debian, they rehost the upstream package and add the debian directory. This means that building Debian packages is mostly hermetic: you don’t need access to the network.

Ahh, the way it's structured makes a lot more sense knowing that. Coming from packaging stuff for Arch, Gentoo and NixOS, where the packaging process is essentially the same for all three, with you usually supplying source download URLs, I had absolutely no idea how debian/rules would allow me to do anything and felt like I was missing a big thing. I guess it really is just a Makefile that you run directly, and that makes sense if you already have the sources in your tree?

  • Pinning, and relatedly that packages can include version constraints in their dependencies.

This, at least version constraints, is another one I'd consider essential tbh. The rest are great though, I agree.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Sure, but the interface is probably just as important as the actual logic behind it, isn't it?

The logic is why I love Apt. Most robust dependency resolution algorithms I've used.

But also, I don't have any issues with the CLI. Having a distinction between apt-get and apt-cache and apt-mark doesn't feel weird to me. You're practically just separating the top-level sub commands by a dash instead of a space. The apt command is really just a convenience thing, and there are specialized tools for the more advanced things. Which is fine by me.

Also, the top level apt command doesn't guarantee a stable CLI, so for scripting you're supposed to use apt-get and friends anyway.

Honestly I would consider that one of the fundamental things a package manager must do.

You'd be surprised. Homebrew (the de facto standard package manager for macOS) doesn't do this. Though, you can at least lookup the "leaf" packages which are not dependencies of any other package.

And, most language-specific package managers can't do this. E.g. if you install software with pip or cargo.

you have to remember the extra step after it's finished installing

If the package is in use, it shouldn't be an orphan.

For example, what if you race with a cleanup job that is removing orphans? (Debian is hyper stable, so I often enable unattended upgrades with autoremove. I'm not so comfortable doing that on Arch ;)

What you've described is just an apt-get install when you start and and apt-get remove when you're done. Or more properly setting it as a build dependency in your source package, to let Apt handle it.

But also, why uninstall build tools?

This, at least version constraints, is another one I'd consider essential tbh. The rest are great though, I agree.

Yeah, version constraints are common. But most other package managers bail with an error when they encounter a conflict. Apt is really good about solving conflicts and proposing solutions. Often it will propose multiple solutions to your conflict for you to choose from.

Again, it's the solver part of Apt that makes it the best IMO.