On 9/20/2006, "Steve Holdoway" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:10:59 +1200 >Robert Fisher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> On Wednesday 20 September 2006 11:43 pm, Christopher Sawtell wrote: >> >> > Keep on with the building of the package. >> > This is the main reason that I will never ever again have anything to do >> > with a 'binary' distribution. In my exp. they are all glamour and no gut s, >> > garnished with packages suffering from bit-rot, and dependency hell. ( I 'd >> > agree that that particular hell is a lot cooler than it used to be, but my >> > exp. is that all the distributions suffer from it. ) >> >> Chris I think that "your experience" might be a bit dated now. >> >> You should try one of the recent Distro releases and refresh your opinion. >> (IMHO) >> >> I recently installed Mepis on my main desktop and everything I need was >> installed (including all dependancies) without a hassle and in only a coup le >> of hours. >> >> Rob > >ime all package managers, irrespective of them being source or binary, are o nly as good as the person who set up the dependencies. As humans are involved , there will always be mistakes made. OK, ubuntu was the latest ( although mi nor! ), but the finger can equally have been pointed at *any* major disributi on in recent history. And when gentoo blew up, it was pretty spectacular! > >I'm not a great fan of gentoo - I feel that it doesn't really do what it pur ports, and building a system using lfs would be a much more real education - the only advantage with building from source I can see is to squeeze a bit mo re performance from your hardware, often at the cost of overnight builds agai n! I am not sure what you think it purports, so I'll try and say what I perceive to be the advantages: The benefit is primarily in control. A USE flag determines what is built into a binary. To take an example: mplayer. Do you want dvd support built in? Maybe you don't want it, as you don't have a DVD drive. You switch off that USE flag. Then dvd support is not built in, and the necessary libraries are also not installed. Unfortunately configurability means choice. And if I make a different choice of use flags I have a different system, and subtle nasties can happen. Thats why overall maintenance of the distro is becoming unweildy. Another thing is ease of importing new packages. ebuilds are easier to write than debian control files or rpm spec files. > >I see no real difference in yum/apt/emerge... would somebody care to enlight en me? Anything rpm based got bad press before they put meta tools like yum, apt etc over the top of rpm. Think of it like running a debian system using dpkg but no apt-get. Once you put a tool like apt or yum on a level above the rpm system it works well. Of course major changes to system libraries, or versions of gcc are going to provide difficulties in any system. > >Steve >
