Migration to Dapper

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday, 23 February 2006 18:47, Derek Broughton wrote:
> > 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.

My thoughts entirely. Not even gentoo tries to attempt that, and if 
any distro could do it, it would be gentoo

> 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.

My own observations tell me that the vast majority of users just use 
apt. If it's not in the Ubuntu repositories, they don't install it.

There's a small group who go further but even then the number of 
packages are small. I have 22 things in /opt, 14 of them are java 
stuff and the rest are there because I insist third party binary only 
stuff like RealPlayer, Acrobat and Opera never goes in /usr.

Developers will use /usr/local a lot, but all the ones I know are 
smart enough to have a cron that backs the whole lot up to cvs daily

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five