Question on package manager

[murali]

Hi,

Have 2010 E17 installed, looks awesome and performs likewise too. However i feel synaptic is quite slow for query/refresh, if we were to look at synaptic in debian, it just flies even though it has about 30K packages in repository. Also happened to check out Unity and it's package manager was also quite fast and laid out well. Any way synaptic can be made equally faster in PCLOS or improved?

I mentioned the other distros only for a lookup perspective, hope no one gets this post wrong. Just wanted to see how PCLOS can be made much better than what it already is.

Also is there a way to selectively upgrade packages instead of getting everything? Right now i do an upgrade and then remove the ones that i don't need.

Thanks.

[T6]

how often do you use synaptic to have the feeling of a slow os? 

around 20 to 30 seconds here for simple installs and a couple minutes to do major upgrades on a atom 1.67 mhz

Texstar mentioned some days ago that synaptic had to go

the reason for this slowness is not clear but synaptic is not developed/oriented to work with rpm packages and pclinux uses rpm

the app in recent versions practically has no support for rpm, next year synaptic will be replaced, not sure with what, possibly with yumex

[Old-Polack]

Hi,

Have 2010 E17 installed, looks awesome and performs likewise too. However i feel synaptic is quite slow for query/refresh, if we were to look at synaptic in debian, it just flies even though it has about 30K packages in repository. Also happened to check out Unity and it's package manager was also quite fast and laid out well. Any way synaptic can be made equally faster in PCLOS or improved?

I mentioned the other distros only for a lookup perspective, hope no one gets this post wrong. Just wanted to see how PCLOS can be made much better than what it already is.

Also is there a way to selectively upgrade packages instead of getting everything? Right now i do an upgrade and then remove the ones that i don't need.

Thanks.

Synaptic upgrades all your installed packages each time you do the Reload --> Mark All Upgrades --> Apply --> Apply routine. There is nothing that is unnecessary added. If you wish to uninstall a particular application, you can do that, but you can't just pick and choose what you will upgrade, or throw out parts of the upgrade because you don't know their purpose. Synaptic knows, that's why they are there. Anything short of a complete upgrade, to keep the system, as a whole, in sync with the current state of the repo will, sooner or later, break your system.

[murali]

Hi T6,

I just look around for anything that interests me, so do use synaptic quite frequently atleast once a day. It's just synaptic that's slow, not the OS itself, OS works flawlessly. Just felt the slowness compared to Debian. Not a big deal really, was just curious to know if anything can be done. Since you say synaptic will go away, hopefully the new replacement will be better in all respects 

Hi Old-polack,

I was more referring to packages like cups, different vendor specific printer drivers, gimp, pidgin, etc which i don't need. So i end up removing them manually after an upgrade. I do agree doing things like this could break the system, but this is PCLOS, never had to face the issue of broken system until now  , touchwood.

Thanks for your replies.

[Xenaflux]

It's just synaptic that's slow, not the OS itself, OS works flawlessly. Just felt the slowness compared to Debian.

Are you sure its synaptic, and not your internet connection to that particular mirror you are downloading from
Here synaptic works at max speed available to me and that's fast for me.

There is a package called " repository speed test" which will give you the fastest mirror at that point in time from where you sit.

Xena

[Dragynn]

It's just synaptic that's slow, not the OS itself, OS works flawlessly. Just felt the slowness compared to Debian.

Are you sure its synaptic, and not your internet connection to that particular mirror you are downloading from
Here synaptic works at max speed available to me and that's fast for me.

There is a package called " repository speed test" which will give you the fastest mirror at that point in time from where you sit.

Xena

That has definitely been my experience, synaptic is like lightning fast on my system, I did a full update that I had been putting off a couple days ago, and had over 100 packages to update, only took about a minute total. After I first loaded the 2010.07 Zen a few months ago, I had over 270 packages to update, that didn't take over two minutes.

Gotta say this too, after the update a couple days ago, I swear my system got at least 20-30% snappier and quicker, and it wasn't anything like slow to start with. It's like Christmas comes every few days around here

[murali]

Yes, i did use repository speed test and chose the one it gave me but was still slow. I use the same internet connection for other Debian based distros and didn't find the slowness there, so thought of checking.

[gseaman]

With the right repo, Synaptic installs fast enough. But, unless something is wrong with all of my installs, I agree that Synaptic is very slow at loading and sorting it's local database. It's not been an issue I've been concerned about, but it's there. I can open and close an e-mail program and a financial program each with thousands of records to sort and they come up almost instantly. If Synaptic was here to stay, it would be worth taking a look at.

Galen

[Xenaflux]

Hmmm
Maybe we are so used to "slow" in this part of the world, that we "think" it's fast.
Till we see the real thing 

Xena

[genomega]

Synaptic is totally  deb centric -> http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/

[longtom]

I actually have the same experience as the OP since I fiddled with PCLinuxOS.  

However, I have the extra minute so it didn't bother me too much.  Of course it would be nice it would be snappier but it's no train smash.

Just to clarify, I am talking about the program running and sorting local stuff, not internet connection related slowness ...

[kjpetrie]

I have to admit it's partly the reason I have mine set to open weekly from cron, ten minutes after cron has done an apt-get update, so it only has to read the database once. It's murder in a virtual machine though, when I need to install packages to build rpms.

Still it'll be gone soon.

[murali]

Yes, my question was exactly what longtom and gseaman mentioned. Not a big deal really, but it would be nice to have it improved. As i mentioned in my original post, something like RPM5 (i think that's what it is called and used by Unity) or similar should be considered, it was really fast, not sure if it's repos are as big as PCLOS.

[kjpetrie]

I think Texstar gave RPM5 as the reason to move away from apt/Synaptic, as it either can't support it or is very buggy.

[Capt Turk]

Something has definitely changed in the last updates. Before, synaptic was slow as molasses. I would click on an item to install, and it would take 30 seconds or more just to show the drop down menu.  Since the update, it is near instantaneous.  It now has about the same speed that I'm used to in Debian based distros.  I've noticed a number of other things that have gotten much faster also.  Whatever they did, I hope they keep it up.