[nylug-talk] Benefits/drawbacks of building Linux as a package [was: Looking for recommendations on Linux Distro]

[Ron Guerin]

Ruben Safir wrote:

> Package managers by and large, actually all of them, suck in the first place
> Your checklist is wishful thinking.  And I'm not talking out of my hat.  I'm
> talking from a SUSE 5.3 distro running on a P2 right now which has been continually patched
> by hand for a LOT of years now.

If by suck, you mean works extremely well and makes millions of people 
happy, then yeah, most of them suck.  Our package managers suck.  I wish 
everything sucked as much as my package manager does.

> The single biggest mistake someone can make aside from a dread aweful
> rm command in jest is to install the Kernel from anything but an authenticed
> source from kernel.org.

This advice runs counter to that of kernel maintainers, especially one 
fellow named Linus Torvalds, who said quite some years ago that the 
kernel.org kernel would henceforth not be a finished and ready to use 
kernel, IHHO.  The quote was something along the lines of "that's the 
job of the packagers"

Millions of people make that "single biggest mistake" every year, and 
they're damn lucky that they do, because there'd be a lot of needless 
pain and suffering if they did not.

- Ron