Migration to Dapper

[Derek Broughton]

Alan McKinnon wrote:

> On Thursday, 23 February 2006 09:26, Senectus . wrote:

>> There's something that Ubuntu has the opportunity to pioneer and do
>> _right_. Find a way to keep track of this information or better yet
>> script a way to find out what's been done _after_ the fact.
>> I realise this wouldn't be a simple thing to do but if you think
>> about it, it's one of those things we really need to get done to
>> put us ahead of the Win environment by a large milestone.
>>
>> Doesn't anyone else think so?
> 
> This would be awesomely hard and probably very error prone. I suspect
> it would cause more problems that it would solve. With respect to
> packages the only things a package manager knows for certain are
> things it installed itself - everything else tends to be a monolithic
> block of files and a package manager has no real way of knowing which
> files went with which extra package.
...
> There's a good reason why no OS has ever tracked packages outside it's
> own package manager: too little information and it mostly can't be
> done reliably

Well, I don't think it's fair to expect the package manager to recognize
anything it didn't install, but it's not really that big a deal to track
what it _did_ - aptitude keeps a nice log.

It would be interesting to try to find out how many people actually use
Ubuntu without _any_ outside (ie, outside apt, not just non-Ubuntu)
packages.  I have a directory containing the tarballs of anything I've
downloaded outside apt - there's only 10, and most of them are obsolete. 
One should be replaced by a .deb this week.
-- 
derek