Lunars package managament

[aRZed]

Hy!

I stumbled on Lunar-Linux today and I find its basic principles very interesting. But reading much of the stuff on this site it left me with some questions:

At home I have a limited itnernet connection. I am allowed to download 4,5 GB data per month. So I want to download the source once and then install/compile it on several different machines. Is this possible with Lunar?

I'd also like some deeper information about the package system and its possibilities.

thanks in advance
aRZed

[engelsman]

Hi, I'm a newbie to Lunar myself, so I can't give you much help other than to point you at one of the articles from the old Lunar web pages (if I can quote this blasted link correctly ):

http://old.lunar-linux.org/?q=node/view/259 Installing Lunar without a (fast) network connection

I started to do this because I didn't originally have Internet at home, and no modem connection on the machine either. The full sources will now take 7 CDs and not the 2 or 3 mentioned in the article. But then then my internet hardware arrived and was installed so I didn't need to pursue this further. (Plus the fact that I'd burned the CDs at work with DOS 8.3 filenames, so the tarballs ended up with meaningless names and the CDs were absolutely useless. )

Of course, you can always set up your first machine with only those packages that you want, and then copy the moonbase and the already downloaded tarballs onto CDs. Mount these CDs on your other newly installed systems and synchronise moonbases and /var/spool/lunar as required.

Hope this helps, and isn't too wide of the mark.

[Guest]

yes this helps a bit, thanks! - at least I know now that I can hold a local copy of the moonbase and that I don't need to have the source for programs that I don't want.

But there are still to many things about the package management that I don't know....:

When I compile a package on one machine and I have another one which can use the same binaries. Is it possible to compile this package once and then install it on two systems? Or with other words, can I use binary packages too?

Does lunar also have source-diffs ... I mean if I update a program then I normally need only a diff between the two versions. If there is no diff I have to download the whole package again.

Is it possible to handle different versions of a package? For example if i want to install FOX 1.2.x (for some reasons) but the newest is 1.4.x ... can I do that with lunar-linux?

[engelsman]

Sorry, but if you look at my Talk Page you can see that I'm learning the ropes again.

One of the old ropes I do remember is 'rdist' so you could try that, or whatever its modern equivalent is.
(This is well beyond what I need on my one-box network at home)