[ale] Favorite distros

[Mike Panetta]

On Mon, 2002-08-26 at 11:08, Joseph A. Knapka wrote:

> 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.

I used to do this all the time.  It had got to the point where I got
sick of always needing to find tarfile-x to resolve dependancy-y, and
then find out that tarfile-x needs tarfile-z to resolve dependancy-aa,
ad-nausium...  Then I found RedHat.  I like RedHat :).  I like it so
well, I learned how to make packages for it when I needed to (well, that
was because I needed to learn for my Job at the time, but it was still
fun).



> 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.

Just because you are running a distro that is package based, it does not
mean you have to use packages for the software you want to run.  Thats
what /usr/local is for.  Or even /opt.  If VNC did not work on gentoo,
build it yourself and put it somewhere out of the way so you can manage
it yourself.  Either that or figure out how to make/fix the package
yourself.  I do not know about gentoo (yet, it looks more and more like
I need to try it), but making a redhat package is easy as pie.  Its just
as simple as scripting all the things you normally would have done to
configure and install the package by hand.  Sometimes you may have to
patch the source to get it to build as an RPM, but thats a very very
rare occurence, and its usually due to a misbehaved ./configure script
(assuming what you are trying to install uses autoconf).  I understand
its even easier to make a debian package.


Just my $0.02
Mike

> 
> 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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