[Sheflug] A mixed bag of problems

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Brown <simon [at] cliffestones.demon.co.uk> writes:

    Simon> firstly is it possible just to copy /etc/passwd from one
    Simon> machine to another?  I'm changing the HD on a box and I'd
    Simon> love to not have change every users passwd in the
    Simon> process. It is shadowed if thats important.

Sure.  I usually just tar up the whole /etc hierarchy, attach the new
drive to a spare interface (disconnect your CD-ROM drive if you have
to), partition it, mount the new root partition on /mnt, and then
untar the /etc stuff in /mnt/etc.  This guarantees that you'll get all
the related stuff (you definitely want /etc/group, too, and
/etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow if you have them, and probably the backup
files too).

    Simon> Also can I just ask what are .debs like to deal with
    Simon> because after 1 year on rpms with Red Hat and now Suse I
    Simon> have developed a hatred for them. Prety much everything I
    Simon> install now I build from source. I tried installing some
    Simon> gtk rpms the other day but found they'd been built against
    Simon> glibc 2.2 which was pretty annoying.

With Debian you can get the best of both worlds:

$ cd /usr/src/Debian
$ su -c 'apt-get source $package'
$ debian/rules build
$ su -c 'debian/rules binary'
$ su -c 'dpkg -i ../$package_$version-$debrev.deb'

the point being that `apt-get' is the standard package fetcher, and it
knows about source.

Otherwise .debs are little different from RPMs.

Except that if you get to the point of doing stuff that isn't in
Debian yet, there is a lot of stuff around to help you get started
with the .deb format---both technical and Debian policy, more so than
with RPM I believe.  (On the basis that an experienced maintainer I
know has been doing all-nighters all last week learning how to make
good RPMs now that he has joined an RPM distro.)


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