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

[Ron Guerin]

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

> 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.

Actually I'm pretty sure we have not discussed package management in 
person, however we have discussed it on mailing lists more than once.  I 
used to use a Rotten Package Manager, I no longer do.  On a desktop, I 
briefly used one resembling a Carmine Rug, which periodically made a 
monkey-powered mess of that box.  When I got tired of suffering and 
wasting lots of time compiling things from upstream tarballs, I switched 
all my boxes to a better thought out distro with a better package 
management system, and as you know I have been using an Almost Perfect 
Tool for something like eight years now, and life's been swell.  I give 
it two thumbs up and five stars.  Of course one's package manager is no 
better than the packages behind it, you need both good packages and a 
good package manager.  As Sunny has said here before, most people who 
get into trouble these days have gone and polluted their system with an 
RPM they found in FreshRPMs, said RPM being of questionable quality, and 
quite often not meant for their system.  That person would have screwed 
themselves up doing it any other way as well.

- Ron