apt-get install questions

[Martin_J Carter]

begin  quote  Henning Glawe <glaweh at physik.fu-berlin.de> 2003-06-03 15:42:22:

>On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 03:58:42PM +0200, Thomas Lange wrote:
>> install_packages is running "dpkg --configure --pending" after all
>> packages are installed. This should solve the iU problem. Maybe "dpkg --configure -a"
>> would be better.
>Both are equivalent; but long options are generally more readable, so
>IMHO they should be preferred in scripts...

Methinks the underlying problem might be that dselect, apt-get et al don't
(yet) follow Recommends: directives without external help.  (There's moves
afoot, I believe, to add an appropriate flag to aptitude, but that won't help
our setup here, as it's woody-based.)  The upshot is that when I go
into dselect interactively on a newly-FAIed system, there's tons of
recommendations waiting for me.

Rather than duplicate that all in the FAI package requests (and
then have to track any dependency changes), I've adopted the
following modus operandi: Build the new client with FAI, then
log in once as root, change the password, and run dselect by
hand.  It's not *fully* automated, but the post-pass doubles as a
QA test .... if the system as built isn't fully functional, I'd rather find
out straight away for myself, rather than get complaints from a
customer two weeks down the line that he hasn't been able to do
any work for a fortnight.


        MaJoC
----
Dr M J Carter
Physics and Astronomy
University of Nottingham
E-mail: Martin.J.Carter at nottingham.ac.uk