[Beowulf] Parallel Development Tools

Wed Oct 17 10:50:17 PDT 2007

Drifting off a bit further, but as I see it, the biggest advantage of FC 
over debien/ubuntu is kickstart. Or???

/jon

Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, andrew holway wrote:
>
>> Apt-cache with a bit of grep is a powerful tool indeed.
>>
>> $apt-cache search foo | grep bar
>>
>> everyone I work with however prefers yum. They regard Debian as being
>> a bit backward.
>
> I don't know if Debian is backward, but I will affirm that yum is pretty
> fashion-forward.  I'm probably biased, of course, since I wrote the
> original HOWTO and since Seth developed it about seventy feet from where
> I'm sitting right now.  I've never seriously contributed to its
> development but I've been a user for years, and it continues to improve
> even now.
>
> There are lots of ways to search out info using yum, some faster or more
> complex than others, but the most common ones, also the most useful and
> fastest, are as simple as "yum list \*whatever\*, e.g. --
>
> rgb at ganesh|B:1011>yum list \*pvm\*
> Available Packages
> pvm.x86_64                               3.4.5-7.fc6.1          fedora 
> pvm-gui.x86_64                           3.4.5-7.fc6.1          fedora
>
> It also supports yum search foo (likely to get more than you really
> want), yum info, yum deplist, etc. most of which I rarely use.  It's
> nice to do "yum info \* > /tmp/yum.list" once right after an install or
> upgrade, though, as this pretty much gives you a catalog of all the
> available packages and their synopses, so that you can find almost
> anything efficiently and interactively with less /tmp/yum.list and its
> built in find tools, or via grep , or by just plain browsing through it.
>
> Of course with 20K or so packages, browsing through Debian is a bit more
> tedious I understand...;-)
>
>    rgb
>
>>
>> On 17/10/2007, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 16 Oct 2007, at 10:19 pm, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, Jon Tegner wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> You should switch to a .deb-system, to save you some trouble:
>>>>>
>>>>> $ apt-cache search jove
>>>>> jove - Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs - a compact, powerful editor
>>>>>
>>>>> Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
>>>>
>>>> Hey, it's ok.  I'm actually trisystemal.  FC 6 on top (soon to jump to
>>>> 8, but in no hurry), VMware, then debian and XP Pro VM.  And yes,
>>>> it was
>>>> a good thing debian already had jove as I still don't really know
>>>> how to
>>>> build debian packages,
>>>
>>> If you want a good introduction to debian packages and how they work,
>>> then I recommend Martin Krafft's book "The Debian System".  I've been
>>> a Debian Developer for ten years, and that book still teaches me
>>> useful stuff about Debian on a regular basis.
>>>
>>> The chapter on packaging is superb; it teaches you how to make
>>> packages from the ground up, so you really understand how they work,
>>> starting with the basic fact that fundamentally a debian binary
>>> package is an ar archive which contains two tarballs.  One,
>>> data.tar.gz contains the files belonging to the package.  The other,
>>> control.tar.gz, contains the scripts and information about the
>>> package used by the packaging tools, and at a minimum this contains
>>> two files:  DEBIAN/control, which contains the information about the
>>> package (description, dependencies and whatnot) and DEBIAN/md5sums
>>> which is, as you'd expect, a list of md5sums of all the plain files
>>> in the package.
>>>
>>> Once he's shown you how to build a Debian package manually like that,
>>> he then shows you how to do it the more normal way using the various
>>> wrapper scripts that Debian provides for the purpose to make life a
>>> bit easier (and to help enforce the Debian policy on packages)
>>>
>>> Debian doesn't really have a source package idea like Red Hat -
>>> instead, when you use "apt-get source" to download the source for a
>>> package you get three files; the upstream tarball, which is
>>> completely unmodified from upstream.  You also get a gzipped patch,
>>> and a description file containing md5sums for the patch and the
>>> tarball, amongst other things.  Typically, the patch creates a debian
>>> directory within the upstream source directory, and inside that
>>> debian directory is a file called "rules".  This is just a normal
>>> makefile, containing all the instructions for configuring, compiling
>>> and packaging the software on a Debian system.  Once you have one of
>>> these things, building the .debs is just a matter of typing:
>>>
>>> dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
>>>
>>> or something similar.  There are still fancier things available for
>>> doing this by keeping the sources and debian/* files in a CVS,
>>> subversion or other revision control repository.  I use these in my
>>> own package management activities to be able to go back and build
>>> previous releases when users report bugs against them.
>>>
>>>> and manage to get myself confused by apt tools
>>>
>>> I can sympathise.  I've only started using aptitude since etch came
>>> out, and it's taken me some time to get used to, but now that I am, I
>>> quite like it, for the most part.  Especially the etch version, the
>>> version of it in sarge had some really annoying behaviour under
>>> certain circumstances.
>>>
>>>> (I'm too used to yum).  But there is no doubt:
>>>>
>>>>   a) Debian is a perfectly useful, fully functional variety of linux,
>>>> and I have been painfully taught to bow down before its selection of
>>>> available packages, which is for all practical purposes inexhaustible.
>>>> In fact, you need a search engine with powerful features even to go
>>>> shopping amongst them.
>>>
>>> ... which fortunately it provides for you.  It's called apt-cache.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Tim
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>>  The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
>>>  Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
>>>  company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
>>>  office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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>>
>