[Nottingham] Debian devotion [was: OE Reply Fixer]

[Robert Davies]

On Wednesday 05 March 2003 10:50, you wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 10:11:31AM +0000, Robert Davies wrote:
> > On Wednesday 05 March 2003 08:17, you wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 07:54:51AM +0000, Robert Davies wrote:
> > > > For dialup, surely downloading source patches and applying then
> > > > re-compiling, linking and installing automatically, will be the
> > > > fastest way.
> > >
> > > With 1meg CM or whatever you've got then grabbing source patches will
> > > indeed be quick however you then have to patch and compile.  I know
> > > people who run gentoo and all their computers seem to *do* is be
> > > compiling something.
> > > Depends what you want to do really.
> >
> > Well my Debian dialup, all it seemed to do was download something, if
> > you do not have flat rate package it is a royal pain.
>
> That's unusual.  My stable systems rarely see updates and when they do
> they are only security updates or the point releases.  (The point
> releases being mostly security or evil bug fixes).

Maybe I tried it at a bad time, anyone remember when "format string" problem  
was discovered and opened up a whole new class of security fixes.  There was 
a lot of fall out from those bugs!

Also all the software that I wanted to try, generally would have some update 
or other.  I know folk who binned Debian after years of enthusiasm, due to 
constant updates tracking unstable, often due to minor packaging changes, and 
moved to Gentoo.

If you have a number of machines, you can use one fast one as a compile host, 
or it could be worth trying distcc(1) and having the compiles parallel 
processed.

> But once you get into gentoo it's not a "Oh well I'll recompile bzip but
> won't bother with xterm because once it's loaded, it's fine" attitude.
> You have to do it all.  I guess that's why I like binary packages.  I

You when using optimistation settings, end up wanting to update key 
libraries, and there comes a point where it's simpler to compile the whole 
system.

I'll see how my dual Celery system handles it, the base install tarball is 
only 10MB, and be fun to see how long complete compilation takes.

I like binary packages to, for ease of use, but we all know many folk end up 
building packages from source, as "it's easier' usually when there are 
dependency problems, or their distro doesn't make the version of what they 
want available.

Personally I like rpm(8) and have little troubles with it, it's great also to 
build source with, though I *was* inpressed with the Debian source build 
process, when I tried that out.

Rob