Le 27.08.2013 13:29, Ralf Mardorf a écrit :
On Tue, 2013-08-27 at 21:16 +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
On 8/27/13, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> You're free to consider the distros you mentioned as the best
distros,
> but by doing this you miss a basic approach of FLOSS. There isn't
such
> as a commercial competition, or radical political model.
What you say does not make sense.
You are free to ignore most (or all) of what I say, and to make
assumptions about things I have supposedly considered or said.
Free to do so, but not useful...
What branch of Debian do you recommend to contribute in development
of
important Linux userspace projects?
I explained that you can't do that, if you experience a dependency
hell
or an unstable environment. To contribute that way users and
developers
need stable up-to-date releases of software + sometimes newer
releases
than the current stable releases. Debian doesn't provide a stable
branch
that is up-to-date, in sync with stable releases from upstream, even
the
unstable branches of Debian don't provide this.
Wouldn't you call this a drawback for the evolution of Linux, while
it
has less, if any advantages to go this way?
Is there is any distro with binaries from "trunk/master" ( depending on
if you prefer svn or git ;) ) up to date? It would be quite strange, but
sounds nice.
I think that source distros can have such a system, but they are really
hard to install, and for all other distros, I think users... coders,
just sync with the repo of the libs they need, if they need the latest
development package, and then compile the stuff themselves. On Debian,
you have no real choice, since some libs ( sfml or wxwidgets for example
) does not have the latest version in binaries... In facts, I only had,
for now, to use source repositories for something like 3 libs:
wxwidgets, for the unstable versions ( 2.9.x ), libbullet, because it is
not in Debian's repos ( IIRC ), and pluma-framework, for same reason.
On those libs, wxwidgets 2.9.x is not stable, so I would avoid to use
it to create stuff for production environments. It's API may change
tomorrow, and imply lot of work to adapt (it is not probable, but it is
possible). Other 2 libs just lacks from the Debian's repo, but since
Debian have a very huge package collection, is not it more likely for me
to find my libs in Debian than in other distros with smaller package
collection?
And for SFML... I'm using 1.6 for now. I should use 2.0 or 2.1, but...
I just do not like it's design and API*.
Also, exceptions are almost not used, which imply that I have to
encapsulate the calls to the lib anyway, so switching version of even
library will be easy: I'll just need to rewrite implementation of my
"low level" classes, which is really fast to do.
So, for the young SFML lib, not having the last version is not so
problematic for me, but, yes, Debian does not have the last stable
version of that particular library.
Finally, usually, libraries have some compatibility between versions,
the more recent will support all features and API of older ones. Except
for major releases, or for bad libraries that you should maybe think
twice before using them. It means that it's better to work with older
libs, if you do not require more recent features, to target more
systems. As often when you try to write portable stuff, you can not use
all bleeding edges of all targets.
To conclude, I think that Debian is excellent for programming, because
of the ton of packages it have, and because when the coders needs the
latest version of a lib, they are usually good enough with computers to
clone/compile it ( but I admit that I am often very lazy too, so I try
to avoid doing that. This is one of the reasons I no longer use windows
for my desktop: on Debian, no need to compile and install stuff myself.
Almost never.) .
*:
SDL is, imho, better on that, even if I am a C++ programmer which
really love OOP and exceptions...
I feel like SFML uses OOP to hide stuff which may be useful for real
programming. A problem ( not fixed in more recent versions AFAIK ) I
recently had which is a nice example, is that I had a network error, and
the lib only gave me the indication that there were an error. Yeah.
Nice. There is an error, but you have no way to know which one... fun.
Or not.
Luckily, C gives perror to print the real error on screen, but hey, why
does the SFML lacks function to say what went wrong? SDL is better, it
have such facility, with SDL_GetError(). Of course, it does not handle
network, but the nice point of libs which only handle one thing is that
they can focus and often handle it better. I hate frameworks ( yes, it
means that I hate Qt, too.), really. I prefer UNIX philosophy: one tool
for one thing, and combine tools to have a "framework" which only does
what you really needs.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/8d2a971b05010703f2a8839d0c586...@neutralite.org