TOPICS: dselect, Debian, backports, disclaimer, show me your distros! First, dselect. I think I'm being harder on it than I should be - I have little doubt that it is smarter than apt - apt will happily hose my system with only one confirmation where dselect shows recommended dependency resolutions (and conflicts, if there are any). The interface still leaves some things to be desired. The biggest example is that if dselect is trying to tell you that it is about to hose your system (ie, remove 100-200 packages that you would rather keep), the display of conflicting packages is overwhelming. Once I got used to dealing with it package by package, it was manageable, though. There's more, but it would make this email extravagantly long(er). Anyway, I went through packages one by one, and fixed things, more or less. dselect is working again on my system. Woo.
Second, Debian. I don't argue that Debian is the be-all, end-all distro, even for myself. I do argue that it is the only one I have tried recently that installed successfuly, first time (I reinstalled because I managed to do the hosing mentioned above :), on my hardware. YMMV. I further argue that stability is not the Only reason to install Deb, though it might be one of the best. Two others that I can think of are package management and freedom. The very fact that we can argue about all this package junk is way better than most systems' package management (pardoning explode, or whatever the gentoo one is :). "Debian GNU/Linux is a strong supporter of free software." And it's important to me to support that, even if I use non-free software too (I try to keep this to a minimum - the worst I have is Java - I think that's pretty much it right now). Backports suck because you have to add a line to sources.list for every backport you want to use (defeats apt) - now that my sources and preferences are setup, all I have to do is apt-get -t testing belh, even for a new package. I'm not sure which defeats the purpose more, but I feel more comfy w/ pinning the different versions. In fact, I think this is way harder to get set up correctly, but once you do it's nice. (go ahead & call me a hypocrite, I deserve it: I used the gaim 0.75 backport with much success. Final analysis: I'm not sure which is really better - I may rerereinstall and go to/try backports). Before I get jumped for wanting to try (a very closed) SUSE, I would like to disclaim that it would be for 'research purposes only.' Like marijuana :) I really want to see how close/far Ximian already is in their integrated desktop thing. My question is, what distro should I be using if I want newer than stable software and good package management, And I don't care about compiling my own unless I have to? I am so done. Nate ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
