[ale] Favorite distros

[Joseph A. Knapka]

Byron A Jeff wrote:
> 
> >
> > 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.

Far from "nearly impossible". I've built a great may things on
various versions of Slack, and as long as one reads the
package's installation instructions, there's usually no
problem. If the package INSTALL file says, "First install
libwhizbang.so version 2.3 or higher", I just check to see
whether I've got that, and I usually do. If not, I install
it. No problem. Not automated, but I know exactly what's
installed on the box.

In rare cases (kernel upgrades, for example), there's
painful major surgery required, such as a build of GCC
or glibc. I've suffered through those, and don't really
enjoy it, but I don't hate it that much either.

> 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.

That is nice, agreed. Package management, when done right,
seems to be a Very God Thing. I may share your opinion
of Slackware after using Gentoo for a while. However,
one problem I have with Gentoo (and all the other
distros that rely heavily on a package-management system)
is that if the package you're interested in doesn't
exist for the distro, or even worse, exists but is broken in
some way (cf my recent "VNC on Gentoo" post), there's no
clear way to fix the problem. One reason I use Linux is to
not be dependent on someone else to fix this kind of thing.
I've found hacks to get VNC and Zope to install on
Gentoo, but they weren't trivial, and worse, if I
have to re-install these packages I'll have to do
the same ugly hacks again, because Portage blows your
homebuilt fixes away if you ever do "emerge sync".
Perhaps some better Portage-fu on my part would
resolve this, but that is distro-specific -fu --
one nice thing about Slack is that most of the
stuff you learn there is applicable to any distro,
or even any random version of Unix you happen to
encounter.

Cheers,

-- Joe
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me

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