[SWLUG] Linux Distros and/or FreeBSD

[Telsa Gwynne]

Ar Wed, May 16, 2007 at 12:42:04PM +0100, ysgrifennodd Davage, Marcus:
> I don't want to start a flame war, but here's my problem...
> Is there a distro out there where I can just download an application (or a
> new release of an application) and not worry about libs and sources and
> stuff, or is that part of the whole Linux thing?
> 
> What about Free BSD? Is that any different? Can anyone give a personal
> opinion on Lilnux vs. FreeBSD and why one over the other?

I can't comment on FreeBSD so well. I have used it, but I haven't
had to maintain it. But the dependency problem is infamous on Linux.
It hits everyone at some stage. 

You need to find a system with a package manager with a front-end
which takes all the dependency hell away, and still finds the apps
you want. Traditionally, Debian was the answer. Its package manager
is (or was, I presume it's the same!) dpkg but no-one ever touches
that. They use the front-end to it, apt, which goes and deals with 
the dependencies for you.

So you do "apt-get fooble" and it says "found fooble. To install it,
I shall also need to install fooble-lib, fooble-man and fooble-python.
I can do this. Shall I go on?"

And you say "y" or "n" or "wait a minute here, why does installing
nethack require all of KDE?" (or whatever :)) 

Other people have developed similar front-ends for other distros.
I use "yum" on Fedora, but I imagine I am at least two tools behind
by now. I just told it "sudo yum install beagle" and it thought about 
it and then proposed to me that it would need another 11 packages
totalling 19M, here were the packages and where it would collect
them from, and was this okay? 

I hit "n", but had I genuinely wanted it, it would have been two 
keypresses to get that lot. 


I thought there was something similar for Mandriva. Is that not
the case? In fact, I thought that apt-for-rpm or some such was
sponsored by Conectiva before they became part of Mandriva?

Oh, one thing about repos: repositories are where these programs
goes to look for applications. Most distros have big official ones
(or tiny official ones). And then there are lots of others set up
by people who wanted their favourite package in. There are generally
non-US ones for US-based distros, because US laws can be very silly.
But the more distros you tell your package manager about, the more
complicated it gets and the more confused your package manager gets.
So it's handy to work out which repos you want the most (some
concentrate on media apps, others concentrate on re-rolling everything
to include what the US can't include, others want latest-greatest, etc)
And then only use those.

Telsa