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

[Ruben Safir]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 08:48:34PM -0400, Ron Guerin wrote:
> 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.  

No SUCK I mean SUCK ... like creating a d at mn hell of inconstitancies
by different packagers even WITHIN single distributions that cause
a nightmare of incongruent requirments that lead you to chase packages
into the night to make something work to only find out that 5 other things
are now broken or the latest package that was used has to be UNINSTALLED to
satisfy the stupidy of the new package you want to install.

This is package hell and it results, first and formost, from packaging
systems that can't even FIND what the heck is on your hard drive let alone
understand what they NEED in their databases.

And I'll call you a bald face lier, Ron, right here in public if you
even pretend to not have had this happen to you as we have personally
had conversations to this point face to face.

Then we won't even discuss what happens in package management hell if
god forbid you want to actually load a program with needed features that
exists prior to an official distro's package system is found.

And then we can skip over the whole problem that actually system developers
and programmers need to overcome with packages, who compile their stuff on the
fly.



> 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, 

RMS is KIND when he calls Linus just and engineer.

He's made some stupid things over the last few years, not the least of which surround
DRM and excuse me if I don't kneel to the human G_d of the Linux kernel as an all powerful
and infallable being.

> 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.
>

And vice versa.  Millions of people have gone through needless pain and suffering
because they are OVERLY dependent on package managers, and this is especially 
true of Kernels.

But if you want to pretend that 'make' and autoconf is your enemy, so be it.
It's no sweat off my back.  Meanwhile, if your switching out kernels with a package
not backed with a multimillion dollar indemty and honest to goodness 24/7 tech support
hotline in a production environment, then you deserve what you get when your canned.

Ruben