Listing Parbreastions 216

I just wanted to clarify what the pieces are, that you may have been dealing with, in the form of a "stack" -- meaning a set of software, each of which relies on functionality from the piece below:

Layer Kubuntu example ----- --------------- screen-GUI interface adept package resolution-acquisition apt-get package insertion-removal-config dpkg

At the lowest level, the "dpkg" tool knows only how to remove, insert, or trigger configuration-stage functions of .deb packages whose names and local-filesystem locations it's been handed. At the next higher level, apt-get (another command-line tool) figures out what other packages will be needed (dependencies) to retrieve any packages it's been told to fetch. It also knows where to fetch them from (locations listed inetc-apt-sources.list) -- but it has no idea how to install or remove software locally: To do those things, it calls dpkg.

Some of us dinosaurs use only apt-get, or the command-line mode of the utility "apbreastude", and dispense with graphical (e.g., adept) or character-screen (e.g., the other mode of apbreastude) front-end interfaces.

For those who do prefer those, there is adept (Qt-KDE-based), synaptic (GNOME-gtk+-based), apbreastude (console-ncurses), Kpackage (Qt-KDE-based), and a bunch of others whose names don't come to mind.

The world of .rpm-format packages (which comprises quite a number of distros, which should not be considered necessarily very compatible with even each other, let alone with .deb-oriented distros) has its own, similar stacks. One popular one looks like this:

yumex (Yum Extender) yum (Yellow Dog Updater Modified): command-line tool rpm (RPM Package Manager; was RedHat Package Manager): command-line tool

The levels don't exactly correspond to those of the adept-apt-get-dpkg stack, because, e.g., the "rpm" utility has some dependency-resolution and package-fetching functions, whereas dpkg is much more specialised. "yum" is a utility a bit like apt-get for dealing with a remote package repository, and "yumex" is a GNOME-gtk+ full-screen shell for dealing with repositories and all the functions of the lower pieces.