Wiley Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible 978-0-7645-7644-7 Benutzerhandbuch

he basic unit of software in Debian — and, indeed, in
almost every major operating system today — is the

package. A lot of effort goes into making a package that’s easy
to install and works on the first try. Each package needs to
declare its relationship to other packages; perhaps it needs a
library written by another author, or a separate program to
round out functionality. Packages also need to monitor and
work with their configuration files to ease upgrades and pre-
serve changes.

A large part of administering a system — whether by a home
user or a paid administrator taking care of thousands of
machines — is maintaining the software installed on the com-
puters. This chapter provides some basic background on
packaging systems in general, as well as hands-on examples
for maintaining software on a Debian system.

This section reviews the properties common to almost all
packaging systems, as well as some traits unique to Debian
packages.

Everything about a packaging system, whether source or
binary, is designed around standardization and ease of use.
With the source code available, each user is perfectly capable
of configuring and compiling (building, which is not to be con-
fused with writing) his own software, but the end result is a
very unique machine that can be difficult to administer.

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Package anatomy

Debian packages

Finding and
examining packages

Installing packages

Removing packages

Configuring
packages

Integrity-checking

Package repositories

apt

pinning

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