Why is there no platform independent way of clearing a terminal?

[Mark Lawrence]

In message<[email protected]>, Mark
Lawrence wrote:

On 01/08/2010 08:18, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

In message<[email protected]>, Mark
Lawrence wrote:

On 01/08/2010 07:50, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

In message<[email protected]>, Mark
Lawrence wrote:

Personally I find double clicking on an msi file rather easier.


Easier than apt-get dist-upgrade?


I'm sorry but I only do English, could you please translate.


I run Debian Unstable, which has new goodies coming out on a weekly
basis. The last time I checked for updates, there were over 500 packages
I had installed for which updates were available. It only took a command
like the above to upgrade them all.

How many .msi files would you have to click on to achieve the Windows
equivalent?


... I simply couldn't cope with over 500 installed packages.


Precisely my point. Go back to playing with your .msi toys.

Oh, and<http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/>.

Repeating what was obviously deliberately snipped.

"No idea, but your mental capacity is clearly infinitely higher than mine,
as I simply couldn't cope with over 500 installed packages. What do they
all do, make your lunch and fetch the beer from the fridge amongst other
things?"

How does any user or an admin cope with 500 packages? Can Python help
here, assume an eight hour working day?

c:\Python31\Lib>python
Python 3.1.2 (r312:79149, Mar 21 2010, 00:41:52) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

8*60*60/500

57.6

So every working day you have 57.6 seconds to use each package. Strangely I
don't think anyone will get too much done. Am I in cloud cuckoo land or are
you?

You seem to be mistaken as to what a "package" is.

Python :
* python
* python-minimal
* python2.6
* libbz2
* libc6
* libdb4.8
* libncursesw5
* libreadline6
* mime-support
* python2.6-minimal
* libssl0.9.8
* zlib1g
* debconf
* perl-base
* dpkg
* coreutils
* lzma
* libacl1
* libattr1
* libselinux1
* libgcc1
* libstdc++6
* gcc-4.4-base
* libncurses5
* readline-common

So these are the packages needed just to run Python in Ubuntu. It doesn't
include the packages required for the kernel, the desktop environment, the
window manager, the terminal, and whatever else you want running. In my
fairly clean Ubuntu VM (I use it almost exclusively for testing), I have
close to 1500 packages installed.

I'll stick with my msi files and/or windows update then, unless I have
the luck to get back to VMS. As I said earlier it strikes me that this
*nix stuff is simply archaic.

Kindest regards.

Mark Lawrence.

 

[David Robinow]

...
So these are the packages needed just to run Python in Ubuntu. It doesn't
include the packages required for the kernel, the desktop environment, the
window manager, the terminal, and whatever else you want running. In my
fairly clean Ubuntu VM (I use it almost exclusively for testing), I have
close to 1500 packages installed.

As an admittedly stupid comparison, I have 1579 DLLs in my
\windows\system32 directory.
Some number of these have been upgraded by Windows Update. This is XP
Service Pack 3.
I'm not sure if this means that Windows is better because it has more
packages or that it is worse because it's got too many.

 

[Mark Lawrence]

A package is usually more than one file.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/amd64/linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic/filelist

This is all very well, but what is the unladen airspeed velocity of a
swallow in flight? Answers on a postcard please, given that I expect
both direction and speed!

Kindest regards.

Mark Lawrence.

 

[MRAB]

This is all very well, but what is the unladen airspeed velocity of a
swallow in flight? Answers on a postcard please, given that I expect
both direction and speed!

African or European?

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

As an admittedly stupid comparison, I have 1579 DLLs in my
\windows\system32 directory.
Some number of these have been upgraded by Windows Update.

What about the ones that aren’t? How do you maintain those?

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Sadly, Python's package management is rather lacking by these standards.
The Distutils legacy assumption of “package recipient, system
administrator, and end user are all the same personâ€, among other design
decisions, makes it unusually difficult to have the necessary separation
of concerns between OS packaging, system administration, and end user.

Doesn’t matter. I’m pretty sure Debian has a way of automatically turning a
distutils build into a .deb package with all the right dependencies.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Have you ever tried to make such a package and get it into Debian?

I have found it very easy to recreate the same steps used by the package
maintainers. For instance, “apt-get source <package>†brings down the exact
same source files used by the maintainer to build the package. Also, “apt-
get build-dep <package>†will make sure you have the right development tools
installed to do the build. Then dpkg-buildpackage will build your own
version of the package, in exactly the same way that the maintainers do it.

The automation you speak of must be made and maintained by people, and
they can only automate to the extent that the Distutils output allows.

They seem to manage it OK. Just for fun, I tried building the python-cairo
package from source, and among the output that flew by was

for i in 2.5 2.6; do \
python$i-dbg ./setup.py build; \
done

So they have found a way to automate the package build using distutils,
rather than bypassing it.

Also it manages to perform useful-looking checks like

dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: dependency on libpthread.so.0 could be avoided if
"debian/python-cairo/usr/lib/pyshared/python2.6/cairo/_cairo.so
debian/python-cairo/usr/lib/pyshared/python2.5/cairo/_cairo.so" were not
uselessly linked against it (they use none of its symbols).

Oversight in the upstream build procedure, perhaps?

Anyway, now I have my own .deb files, ready for installation.

 

[David Robinow]

What about the ones that aren’t? How do you maintain those?

Lawrence, you've been asking a lot of off-topic questions about
Microsoft Windows. I think it's wonderful that you're so open to new
ideas, but suggest that you take it to a Windows group, where I'm sure
you'll get a friendly response.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Lawrence, you've been asking a lot of off-topic questions about
Microsoft Windows.

You’ve got to be kidding. Look at the number of Windows-specific questions
this groups is already full of.

 

[alex23]

You’ve got to be kidding. Look at the number of Windows-specific questions
this groups is already full of.

Are you really unable to tell the difference between questions about
Windows-related modules and snarky, off-topic sniping at Windows
itself?