On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:28:03 -0700 "H. S. Teoh" <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Windows, when > installing stuff I used to always get messages like "this installer > wants to overwrite the file C:\\windows\system\asdf1234.dll, proceed > (y/n)?" -- which totally freaks me out.
I use windows basically every day, and I haven't seen that happen since the 90's. > > Building from source, OTOH, tends to work pretty well, if you can get > the thing to compile at all. (Thanks to apt-get, this is relatively > painless nowadays, once you figure out which libraries are needed... That last part is the real problem though. Typing "wget http://blahblah && unzip blahblah && cd blahblah && ./configure && make && make install" may be easy(-ish), but not when you're collecting all the libs (or worse: non-lib dependencies, which then leads you into recursion), and the right versions of all, until the sllloooowwww ./configure or make process finally quits bitching about shit. (And why the freak do I need to re-./configure for every single program that needs compiled? Shouldn't something in autotools already *know* my system details and not have to re-detect *everything* every single time? "Checking X...", "Checking Y...", "Is Z sane..."...? Why? Every other damn autotools-based project *already* checked those every time I compiled them! It's like opening my car door twenty thousand times to make sure "Yup...it's still a car!". If certain changes might go unnoticed then fine, give me a way to force a re-check if really needed.) When I discover I need to build a linux program from source and can't just apt-get it or something, I usually just turn away and look for something else. Discovering an alternate program that *is* in the repo is faster and easier than playing "dependency scavenger hunt". Before tools like apt-get/yum came around, I had actually sworn off Linux entirely, largely because of those sorts of problems (which were only *slightly* less painful with rpm/deb).
