On 31 Jul 2010, at 3:54, Kris Maglione wrote:
On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 03:35:46AM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
On the subject of distros I would like to promote Source Mage as a
class above Gentoo and Arch, although it's really not the right
distro for this topic. I think of it as a class above the purely
rolling update distros because the Source Mage folk found a way to
produce a fairly reliable stable version with frequent releases
despite having a small team. It's certainly not in the same class
as Slackware for reliability, but fixing packages in Source Mage is
probably easier than in most distros.
The only reason I won't use Source Mage is that it doesn't do binary
packages. I used BSD for a lot of years, and tended to build from
source for a lot of those years, even on slow machines. But I
eventually started using pkg_add -R, and now I'm just not willing to
build my entire system from source anymore. It's certainly nice to
have a package system that makes building from source easy (I still
do it often enough), but it's frankly insane for it to be the only
option.
Aye, they have finally started on a binary 'grimoire', after years of
"it would be nice." :) I don't know how much is in it, certainly
firefox, almost certainly gcc since people need a binary gcc to fix
their system more often than any other package. Last I checked I
thought the binary grimoire was growing rapidly but I don't remember
how big it was.
