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On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, Juerd wrote:
> I loves apt. I hates other package management tools, especially those
> that compile from source and provide no easy option to get a binary, or
> make uninstalling to get back the clean system hard.
I'm a bit torn here... On the one hand, I agree that binary packages are
much better (I hate sitting and watching gentoo turn itself into a
semi-functional system, and I hate the 30 minute wait every time I install
a set of packages). OTOH, man Debian can suck rocks sometimes, especially
if you need to do things outside the ordinary. If you ever find your
Debian initrd image builder not finding the right kernel modules to load,
man you're in for a world of hurt, unless you already know the system so
well it won't hit you.
FWIW, it's real darn easy to build binary packages with Gentoo, even of
already installed packages (although it scares me a bit), using
'quickpkg'. It's very useful for switching package revisions around
without having to recompile from scratch every time.
But goddamn, I wish Gentoo had some reasonable, recommended defaults. My
whole system built w/out ALSA support, because I didn't add it to the
make.conf file early enough, and now I've got a gaim that crashes if I
install it with ALSA support, and no sound in my online flash comics, and
when gaim isn't crashing I'm only getting message notifications when
there's no song playing in XMMS (which took me a long-ass time to figure
out -- I'd get notifications between songs).
Ugh. Basically, you pick a packaging solution, and it sucks.
Luke
--
Some people are afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths.
-- Stephen Wright
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Luke Kanies | http://abstractive.org | http://www.bladelogic.com
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