Nice find by Shantanu on the
caret and tasksel:
If you have come across a tutorial or just someone on a forum who
tells you to install something in Debian/Ubuntu that involves using
apt-get, it is ok for you but when they tell you that you need to use a
caret symbol (^) at the end, that’s where you become curious. What is
even more weird is that when you search for the name of the package that
the given command seems to install cannot be found using apt-cache
search. e.g. You will see this used most often when someone tells you
how to install LAMP server setup (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) by using the
command “sudo apt-get install lamp-server^”. If you miss the caret at
the end or try to search for lamp-server, it just doesn’t work.
Well, the answer is that the caret symbol is a short form for
performing a task that otherwise the program “tasksel” would have done
with the given package name. tasksel is a program to ease the
installation of commonly used things that go together for a particular
use. e.g. In the above instance of LAMP, the four packages and their
dependencies are always used together, so tasksel provides a sort of a
meta-package or meta-task that can be run by the user with a single
command and then tasksel will take it upon itself to install all of them
and set them up correctly for your use. Now, apt-get provides a way to
perform that same task by itself without you having to install tasksel
first and all you have to do is to give that same package name to
apt-get but just append a caret at the end to tell apt-get that it is a
tasksel package/task identifier and not a regular package name in
debian/ubuntu repositories.
No comments:
Post a Comment