On 21 February 2012 15:06, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yeah, Unixland really works best with the "here's the source code, > compile it yourself" model, rather than with the Windows "here's the > binary executable" model. Gentoo's emerge is a step closer to making it > more accessible to end-users (i.e. non-programmers who don't know what > "compile" means), but still, compiling source code isn't always an > option.
As a former Gentoo user, emerge is not user friendly (but neither is the OS in general), I get your point however. Arch Linux does well with the Arch Build System. pacman (the package manager) just installs the software the way the package tells it to, it has built-in support for remote repositories, but you can also just install local packages. This means that a system like the Arch User Repository works, since not everything in the official repos is update, and not everything is even /in/ the repos, I can normally go to the AUR, download a PKGBUILD archive, extract it, use makepkg to download+build it, then use pacman to install it. Not the simplest workflow in the world, but there are utilities like yaourt to make it easier (basically pacman for AUR). -- James Miller
