[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[Nix]

On 10 Jul 2009, John G. Walker spake thusly:

> On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:34:23 +0000 James Hawtin <oolon at ankh.org> wrote:
>
>> One of
>> the largest annoynaces can be different package and updates between
>> an dev and a production evironment. 
>
> Which is one of the reasons why there should be separate testing apart
> from the program testing on the developer's own machine,

Even then: I maintain a huge free software repository at work on our
development machines, out of my home directory (started because I was
allergic to Solaris 2.6 userspace, but it's, uh, grown). I understand
that some people like some packages, other people like others, and even
if you love colourized ls and GNU echo you really do need to turn them
off when testing.

So my session-installation script contains a sort of
mini-package-manager which populates a directory under /tmp with
symlinks to the enabled packages and points PATH et al through it, and
allows users to turn them on or off wholesale, package-by-package or
file-by-file, at any time (respecting inter-package deps of course). It
has proved very much worth it, although it *did* add ~2s to everyone's
session startup time (making all those symlinks: I'd copy the standard
set from a standard location, but everyone's preferences vary so much
that there *is* no standard set!)
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