Revelation Not Installed?

Mario Vukelic mario.vukelic at dantian.org
Sat Apr 15 11:17:25 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 03:43 -0400, Don Parris wrote:
> I knew I had a problem with the Update Manager when I ran the update, it
> seemed to install, but nothing happened.  I can't remember whether it
> displays a message after completing the update, but it just went back to
> the normal screen.  I thought the "Install" button should be grayed out
> after a successful update. 

I just checked, the Install button is not grayed out after applying the
update, at least on Dapper. (I would say this is a little UI bug, and
there are others in update-manager, like the fact that it always shows
"your system is up to date" without checking the repositories after
launching - I will file them if they aren't yet)

Nevertheless, other things you wrote sound not right. The Update Manager
has a little arrow labeled "Details" which you can open to see the
output of the operations it does. What does it say during an update?

> Am I correct in assuming that the "Add Applications" and
> Update Manager" are part of Synaptic (or tie into it somehow)?  Or are
> they separate front-ends to apt-get?

Add Applications, Update Manager, and Synaptic, as well as the CLI
tools, aptitude, apt-get, wajig et al., and the KDE package manager are
all separate applications which however access the same package
database. One could say they are all front-ends to APT, the Advanced
Package Manager, as it is properly named.

(However, besides the package information, they often collect their own
info, which is not always shared. E.g., aptitude records which packages
you install directly, and which are only pulled in because of
dependencies. This way it can, e.g.,  remove packages automatically when
the depending package, which caused their installation, is being
removed. This information is not accessed by (all of? most of?) the
other applications, and therefore only works reliably if you always use
aptitude. The change logging mechanisms are also different)

However, the higher-level ones frequently call the lower-level ones. I'm
pretty sure most use at least dpkg to handle the actual install and
removal of the packages. I'm pretty sure wajig uses apt-for dependency
resolution, while aptitude accesses the APT library independently from
apt-get. Synaptic I think uses apt-get.
You can check these by looking at a process tools such as top (on the
CLI) or System Monitor (in Gnome) while running the package tools. And I
guess the documentation of the packages will also mention what they do.

Regards, M






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