"We have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller
packages should be preferred over larger ones. We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian's apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable,
and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provide
concrete benefits to end users."
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Member since:2006-07-08
On Debian if you try to remove Evolution (obviously a Gnome desktop) than apt-get will try to remove Gnome. I emailed somebody at Debian about this, and he said that the next release will fix whatever caused this. Perhaps somebody has the technical knowledge to fill in the gaps of my very vague description. I don't know how Ubuntu responds under the same circumstances.
Member since:2006-06-19
On Debian if you try to remove Evolution (obviously a Gnome desktop) than apt-get will try to remove Gnome. I emailed somebody at Debian about this, and he said that the next release will fix whatever caused this. Perhaps somebody has the technical knowledge to fill in the gaps of my very vague description. I don't know how Ubuntu responds under the same circumstances.
It will remove a meta-package (wrapper) called gnome that is used to install bunch of programs that they call (as a whole) gnome. In other words, it will not remove ANY programs (that I can think of) only the wrapping paper for the package called gnome.
Member since:2007-06-04
Hi Dean. :-) We address this on the forum posts over at Freespire related to the Linspire Letter that was sent out. In particular, my comment at:
http://forum.freespire.org/showthread.php?p=62301#post62301
The study was done on Linspire's distribution (warehouse). The distribution obviously does make a difference to what specific issues you'll see using APT, but I guarantee you no current distribution can protect you from APT's problems with dependency resolution...the problem of removals and failure to install can't be resolved with distribution-side QA checks because it's heavily dependent on the user's machine configuration. Furthermore, we offer optimization of the solution: we can find you the newest packages, the smallest packages, the highest rated packages, the most stable packages, whatever you can come up with to assign value to packages. This alone, even without the completeness and optimal removal guarantees, is a significant improvement on APTs heuristic approach.
So many distros go for an APT basis because APT is a whole lot better than a lot of the other options. Just because something is better than the other options doesn't mean we should decide against improving it for the future though: that's the anti-innovation mindset that OSS tries so hard to rebel against.
Member since:
2006-06-19
Confused....was this a study done on *spire or on Debian? I could of swore that *spire use to claim that CNR did not even use apt - so which is it? I think any study related to apt should be done on debian.
In our experiments, we discovered a real user trace where an install attempt for OCaml using apt-get caused 61 packages to be removed, including the Linux kernel This poor user would not be able to reboot their machine after installing OCaml.
I am not familiar with any issue on Debian about installing Ocaml and it removing the kernel and 60 packages? Anyone else? Oh, that poor user!
Was this done using Debians repository or Linspires warehouse? I am not sure if using the Linspire repository is the best test case for a study since iirc they like to mix packages from various debian flavors and make it a bit messy. Then again, maybe it is the perfect test for OPIUM but I am not sure it is reflective of the nature of apt either. Anyone else?
He also has a pdf slideshow presentation on his site -
http://www.cjtucker.com/ICSE_Presentation.pdf
Oh and it was also a Linspire Letter
http://www.linspire.com/linspire_letter_archives.php?id=46
Is he basically saying that apt is broke? I wonder why so many distros use apt and go for a debian base if apt is such a horrible tool?
Is this just a marketing tool to sell the *new and improved* CNR?
Edited 2007-06-04 17:25