How to clean up apt-get

[Steve]

Roberto Mello wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 11:57:10AM -0600, Nicholas Leippe wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying that gentoo does a better job than 
>>debian--imo they are both very comprobable.  I personally happen to like 
>>gentoo's interface much better than debians.  I think it's much simpler to 
>>    
>>
>
>gentoo's interface of what? Are you referring to emerge? It'd be nice if
>you corroborated your claim with some examples.
>
>  
>
>>learn and understand--whereas the default debian interface requires a gnu 
>>mind-set 'you _must_ read the docs and learn a bunch of one letter commands 
>>to navigate and do anything in the app'.
>>    
>>
>
>Again, examples and more context would be nice. "debian interface" of
>what? Package management? There are several programs for dealing with
>debian packages, all front-ends to dpkg, which you really shouldn't deal
>with directly except for well, exceptional occasions.
>
>  
>
>>All-in-all, I've been equally impressed with their abilities to correctly 
>>resolve dependency issues and actually help me mitigate them, rather than rpm 
>>    
>>
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>Resolving dependencies when you're compiling everything from scratch is a
>lot easier, I presume. Just grab all the sources and their dependencies
>and compile them. There are no binary incompatibilities to deal with.
>
>Of course you pay a price for that, but to say that one is "better" than
>the other for dependency resolution isn't quite an accurate comparison.
>
>-Roberto
>/*
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>*/
>
>  
>
Well, like I said earlier I've never had a problem with dependencies 
when running Gentoo.
My idea of a good interface is something that works as expect every 
time, without me having to baby sit it.
I run a daily cron job on emerge --sync && emerge -ud --world that has 
kept my desktop computer up to date and in sync for going on a couple 
years now, and only ever had one time it wasn't successfuly, which was 
during the transition from GCC 3.3 to 3.4 IIRC.
Anyways, I like gentoo, love it really when compared to the other 
alternatives I've tried.
If I need something I just emerge it.  I don't have to spend 3-4 hours 
tracking down libxyz.so which may or may not still be available.  And if 
something is not available as an ebuild, you can typically make your own 
from a source tarball, in about 5-10 commands.  Then use a package 
overlay.  If the package ever does become an ebuild, you can remove the 
overlay with about 3-4 commands, and no harm is done to your system.