[rescue] Re: Re: Small serial terminal

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 12:13:46AM +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:

> Holy cow, you're nuts. Mandrake and Suse are built to stay with your
> hands out of every possible text file. Every time you use the config
> tools it will screw your carefully configured stuff.

Config tools?  I suppose I vaguely remeber hearing something about them
existing.  Never tried them though.
 
> Redo the init scripts? ditch the package management system? I can see your 
> point if you run slackware, but on any other distro you just didn't 
> understand what a distro is. The advantage of those is PACKAGE management - 
> it's that little something that *bsd nearly not have, and linux does. dpkg 
> and apt still amaze me every day. 

dpkg and apt amaze me less now that I find info on reparing them on my
debian gnu/linux machine. :(
 
> Recompile? from tarbals I suppose? Or with apt-get, editing debian/rules (no 
> joke ;) ) and entering other compiletime options or GCC flags? 

No, recompile from tarballs.  Editing whatever needs edited,(usually, a
--prefix= on the ./configure is all that is needed, but sometimes
tarballs are more broken, especially when on Solaris or Irix.  I don't
screw around too much with Solaris and Irix configuration.  They scare
me.  But I screw around with linux and NetBSD configuration a lot.
 
> > BTW, I was starting to like Debian's package system, but it seems that
> > if it's config files get hosed (say, because the harddrive they reside
> > on starts failing, and corrupts the blocks that the files lived in),
> > there is no realistic way to get it back without reinstalling the
> > machine.  So, my debian machine is getting the install everything by
> > hand and reconfigure as I see fit treatment now.
> 
> Ok now you're going too far! What nonsense. You obviously even didn't bother 
> to read the dpkg man pages didn't you? Just as a test, I hosed my proftpd 
> configuration files. Next step:
> 
> # dpkg-reconfigure proftpd
> 
> and THIRTY seconds later I had a working proftpd again. Now tell me what os 
> has a package management system and which has not.

Ahem.  I did.  Now, perhaps you are more of a debian guru and can help me.

root at ecstacy:~# dpkg-reconfigure gcc
dpkg-query: failed to open package info file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' for
reading: No such file or directory
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: gcc is not installed
root at ecstacy:~# dpkg-reconfigure autoconf
dpkg-query: failed to open package info file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' for
reading: No such file or directory
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: autoconf is not installed
root at ecstacy:~# dpkg-reconfigure binutils 
dpkg-query: failed to open package info file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' for
reading: No such file or directory
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: binutils is not installed
root at ecstacy:~#