[SWLUG] Problems

[Mark Fisher]

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On Tuesday 11 November 2003 6:59 pm, Chris M. Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Steve Anderson wrote:
> > Red Hat 9 (hey, I'm a newbie - one of my cardboard-box mounted computers
> > is going to be Debian or Gentoo now I'm getting to grips)
>
> Given the choice of the two, I'd take Debian.  The install process is
> painful at times, and up-to-date software is occasionally difficult to
> come by ("How many known bugs are you willing to live with?") though I'm
> told this is improving).  That said, Debian-based systems have the very
> handy one-line install and upgrade mechanisms via apt - something which
> vanilla RPM has yet to achieve.

Im a Gentoo-er and your point here, about up-to-date software is one of the 
main reasons why I run Gentoo onboth my server and workstation.  I have used 
RedHat on and off a number of times and the inherant problems of RPM are well 
documented from both an administration and latest version/security point of 
view.  Its been a while since I looked at Debian but at the time the latest 
stable version was woody IIRC and apt seemed to be as slow as rpm at keeping 
in line with software updates.

- From an open source advocate point of view, I think this is therefore failing 
one of the great pluses for open source over closed source - its ability to 
patch up holes quickly and get the updates into the field.

If you have a packaging system which is a month or 2 behind, your on the same 
slippery slope as Redmond, arent you?

> Undoubtedly I will get flamed for what I am about to say, but here follows
> my usual diatribe on Gentoo.  If I want to play with source packages, then
> I will experiment with Linux From Scratch, or similar systems, which
> typically involve actually sitting down and manually putting the
> compilation process into action.  There is much to be learnt from
> going through this process.  Gentoo (in part) "works" by taking a
> bunch of source packages, and automatically building them all.  Given that
> it builds such things as X, you'll be waiting for quite some time for
> everything to build, and you typically learn nothing from the experience
> (other than the fact that X takes a fscking long time to build 8), and end
> up with binaries very much like any other system.  If I want my binaries
> to be very much like any other system, then I'll let other people use
> their CPU cycles to build the software, and issue binaries that they have
> kindly provided, rather than waste my own time and effort.  To
> paraphrase what many people have said over the years: "As nice as it is to
> have a computer build all this, to be honest I'd rather be using the thing
> instead."

Nah no need to flame ;o)  I couldnt agree more, people always get the 'oh but 
its optimised for my arch' arguement out of the cupboard for using Gentoo, 
but lets face it, we're only talking about 2 or 3% and given the time it 
takes to compile some of the packages out there (X is a good example) its 
hardly a saaving, when you consider apt-get, up2date or Mandrakes 'urpmi' can 
install X in minutes.

LFS is somthing that I have wanted to do for some time now and yes, the 
install process for Gentoo looks almost as frightening as the LFS one :P  
Differences?  Well, LFS doesnt have portage !

Personally, I think portage is the best packaging system ive used. For those 
who are not familiar with it, its based on FreeBSD's Ports system and is 
basically a framework for making compiling from source less of a headache.  
Remember all those times when you've had to read the INSTALL or README files 
to discover what magic waits before you in the configure script or how you 
install your package into /whatever rather than /usr/local - well portage 
handles all that for you.  And, as its all being build from source, its 
*much* quicker at releasing the updated code and making it available for you 
to install (be it as marked stable or unstable).

If anyone wants to know more about portage, give me a shout and ill try to 
pass on the (little) knowledge I have of it :o)

> That said, I'm a Red Hat user who has experimented with LFS previously,
> however I just do not have the patience or strength of will to complete
> the Debian install process :)
>
> Anyway, have fun, and welcome to your local LUG,

- -- 
	Mark
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