[ale] Favorite distros

[Byron A Jeff]

> 
> Well, I don't know much about Slackware at all, but I hope its package
> management is a little better than gentoo's seems to be. 

Nope. Not even close. The brilliance in Slack's package management scheme is
in the fact that there really isn't one. This makes it simple for self
contained packages. However that's not how the Linux world works much anymore.
The real problem in package management is dependencies, because nearly every
package depends on some subsystem or library or tool in order to work.
Slack is a total loss here because almost no one builds precompiled Slack
packages anymore and compiling from source is nearly impossible because you
are obligated to track any library or tool dependency by hand.

Gentoo has all of those facilities in spades. A perfect example is what I'm 
compiling now: OpenOffice. Right in the middle of the install it stops and
tells me that OpenOffice is dependant on the gcc-3.0 compiler which I do not
have installed. Under Slack that would have been a showstopper. But with 
gentoo I simply tell it to build the compiler and off it goes downloading,
configuring, compiling and installing the compiler and all of its dependencies
without any input from me whatsoever. 

> I would have
> thought that with everyone else having something to handle this that the
> gentoo folks would have been able to just pick up one of the good ones.

While Gentoo has its flaws, which I described in an earlier post, I'm really
pleasantly surprised with it so far. I've rebuilt in a couple of days what
took me several months to cobble together on my Slackware 7.1 box. I had a time
getting Ogle, mplayer, openoffice, and zine to run on my Slack box. A few
emerges later and everything is already up on Gentoo.

It's no comparison.

BAJ

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