On Fri, 6 Apr 2007, Thomas Rampelberg wrote:
I think you make a valid point about about tracking Debian unstable, or from my experience with Gentoo, just going along with the latest portage tree and evolving the system. Having a set package version to a set OS version is very comforting in the enterprise. It enables me to point at a system and no, without a doubt, what the exact version of software something is running.
Absolutely, it's nice to be able to track that, I agree. But Debian just released etch recentely, like last week, so things are good for Debian folks, as I pointed out.
In fact, what has changed with Debian if you really want to split hairs? It's only the fact that one day, under arbitrary decision, someone decided that unstable was going to now be the stable distribution. So, everyone is sync'd up in the Debian community *if* they upgrade to etch.
As time moves forward, so does software, and as the Debian folks diverge farther and farther away from stable, to add to unstable, the cycle starts all over again...this is a fact of life.
On the other hand, occasionally, there are packages that sometimes are not part of the official package list that I'd like to get installed (newer versions, actually different). At this point, the diversity of portage is very refreshing. I can easily net install a package and someone's already worked through getting it compiled and working on my system.
Sure, but this becomes more complicated over time as well, and it becomes harder for folks to integrate on their system, sometimes duplicating libraries that are either compiled differently or not compatible with the version needed.
Now, onto packaging (and this is gonna sound a lot like emerge on gentoo, I like it!), I'd like to see something that by default has generic binaries that are compiled in the normal manner. However, there are times that I'd like to select specific "features" of the binaries. In gentoo these are called USE flags and let you easily get some optimized binaries that will do only what you want. Not everyone is interested in that much flexibility, but when you're trying to get that extra 10% of performance out of a system, it's priceless.
I think this is the very problem that blastwave faces, as does all other distributions, just that blastwave is easy to use as an example as they exist now in a given state. One tries to add what they will people will need or want, so that in essence you get one-stop-shopping. Then it becomes apparent that joe user didn't want xxx feature which bill user wanted, and tom user's company won't let him install anything that has feature xxx included in it...I have not used Gentoo very much, only once or twice in the past, but the USE flags sound interesting, the only problem I see is that it requires more work on the packaging side to issolate that stuff.
As you can imagine from the comments above, I'd like to see all of this tied to a release tree so that there's no way for your box to update itself into an unworkable state automagically on you.
I would also. OpenSolaris is on the way to getting there, it won't happen overnight, but it will happen.
-- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
