[GNC-dev] Wiki Building Instructions Reorganization

David Cousens davidcousens at bigpond.com
Mon Sep 24 19:29:49 EDT 2018


Adrien,

They are all front ends for dpkg in any case on recent Debian derivatives. I'm not sure about other distributions but
both Linux Mint 18 and 19, and as far as I know Ubuntu 16.04 18.04 seem to have all of the tools installed by default. 

I think the main message to get across is the package manager used on a particular system may not be "apt" or "apt-get"
and if you're not sure you should check the documentation and translate the commands if necessary. The RHEL derived
distributions based on rpm  tend to be even more diverse. 

I've provided a breakout table of the CLI and GUI front ends to the package managers on a variety of systems. In most
cases for simple versions of the command with no options, it is usually just a matter of substituting the particular
package managers name. Only a few use option switches instead of install and remove commands.

I haven't really got out to BSD based distributions but I might dig up some info on those and add it. Otherwise I'm
inclined to add further distributions as they come up in the user forum (other wise I could spend my life reearching
package managers).

David

On Sun, 2018-09-23 at 12:40 -0500, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> Don’t confuse the user land tool ‘apt’ that was introduced with 16.04 with the lower level ‘apt’ that aptitude is a
> front-end for. They aren’t the same thing.
> 
> The naming choice is unfortunate and there is little out there on the web explaining this. Most searches for how to
> use the newer ‘apt’ end up returning results for aptitude and apt-get as ’newer’ methods. (though it is the other way
> around)
> 
> I’m not sure if it was backported to 14.04, but since it isn’t available by default, I’d say just stick with apt-get
> at least until April when 14.04 will be deprecated, then review what the remaining debian derivatives are using.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
> > On Sep 22, 2018, at 3:19 PM, davidcousens49 at gmail.com wrote:
> > 
> > Geert,
> > > I would only do so if all the distro releases we still care 
> > > to support in the debian-sphere ship this tool. If not, I would be tempted to 
> > > stick with apt-get for now and revise this in the future. For example does 
> > > Ubuntu 14.04 already ship the apt tool ? Does Ubuntu 16.04 ?
> > 
> > From 16.04 forward Ubuntu ships with apt rather than apt-get as the preferred mpackage manager and Linux Mint from
> > 18. 
> > aptitude is preferred for debian but it is only a user friendly front end to apt and apt-get is still in the kit on
> > Debian as well. All have the GUI based front end in Synaptic as well. Ubuntu and Linux Mint also ship with aptitude
> > included as well. The install and remove commands are the same as apt & apt-get but some other options are
> > different.
> > apt-get is also really only a setup tool to handle dependencies for dpkg which does the real work. As far as I know
> > apt
> > and aptitude are similarly front ends for dpkg. I don't think we need to go that deeply though. Many distributions
> > also
> > have a Software manager GUI which can also handle most tools and libraries and that is possible preferrable for new
> > users with the shell commands as a fall back
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > Perhaps a table of the package managers vs Distributions?
> > 
> > Could also do the same for the dependencies and table the package names where known with blanks to be filled in by
> > users.
> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
> > David
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-devel mailing list
> > gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> > 
> 
> 
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