On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 11:08:18AM -0800, Bob Miller wrote: > It turns out that when I hand-installed the slimp3 server last fall, I > never got around to writing an init script for it, so it didn't start > up. And there are some other things I hand-installed and need to > check. But the stuff that came from packages just worked. > > So Debian rocks. It isn't the newest stuff, and it's still a bitch > to learn, but when they say stable, they mean it.
Yeah, I just wish they would invest in something like portage for those people who want an emacs without X or other things which would be nice if you could have the system recompile certain packages to your specs rather than depending on the way the maintainer builds the default package. Using Debian's SDL as an example, there is a version with X11, OSS, and OpenGL support, which is considered the lightweight version. Another exists with the above and ALSA. Another exists with X11, OSS, OpenGL, and Gnome's EsounD. Another with X11, OSS, OpenGL, and KDE's aRts sound server. And there is still another with X11, OSS, ALSA, aRts, EsounD, OpenGL, SVGALib, LinuxFB, AAlib, and who knows WTF else is in there! (This coming from the package's maintainer until about the beginning of January..) Under Gentoo, all of those various optional features would be represented by one of Gentoo's various USE flags, and those which were desired would be included. Those which were not would not be. Obviously that requires building from source, and that's not what Debian does usually. So what Debian should do then is to offer the binary package with the most common options (X11, OpenGL, OSS, ALSA, aRts, EsounD, possibly framebuffer?) If you wanted something not there (old ALSA, GGI, AAlib, SVGALib, etc), or decide that something in the package is undesired, you can simply tell apt that from now on it should download the source instead of the binary and compile it using a set of flags, obtained from a variety of sources as Gentoo does. (Gentoo's order is that the system profile sets the base, the global package building config (make.conf) sets the system defaults, and the environment variable USE overrides these. The order is important since basically each of these is split on whitespace and the words are set as individual set/clear commands... I'd add to the list, just before the environment variable the consulting of a database (or python dict) where package-specific flags can be stored. An example of why the package-specific flags would be useful is mtr. I normally want GTK (though not Gnome) support, if available. mtr will use a GTK interface if possible, but I almost always want to copy and paste mtr's output to send to the admin responsible for a braindead router. You can't do that with the GTK interface, so I would prefer to compile mtr without GTK. The database allows batch upgrades while supporting exceptions to the general rule of the system's flag settings. Of course, the big issue is that for this to work in Debian as cleanly as it works in Gentoo, apt must know to build from source those packages you wish rebuilt. No mechanism exists for this, and my belief that neither it nor this flags system is encouraged. Anyone suggesting that Debian adopt a build system more like Gentoo is apparently clueless and unaware that it's better to just compile everything one way. (Don't ask me to explain the logic here..) Oh boy, I think I just described YALD premise. -- Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <-- That boy needs therapy <archnerd> sanity is the playground of the unimaginative.
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