Debian flamewar (plus general ranting)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, at 7:55am, pri.lugofnh at iadonisi.to wrote:
>>  And the fact that BSD ports downloads, configures, builds, and installs
>> all the specified components *from source* leads BSD bigots into thinking
>> that the BSD ports packagers must be doing a much better job then Red Hat
>> or Debian packagers.
> 
>   Yeah, the source junkies never seem to take into account managing
> hundreds or even thousands of boxes.  './configure;make;make install' gets
> old *real* fast in those situations.

  At least BSD ports automates that much.

  Really, though, I was referring to the fact that BSD ports (or Gentoo
portage) is not magically better at handling dependencies; rather, by
building everything locally, it bypasses the problem.  Since the build
environment *is* the target environment, everything becomes much easier.

  And, ideally, I suspect that is the way to go.  Alas, "closed source"  
software still plays far too big a role in my world for me to take that
route.  And as soon as you introduce one pre-compiled binary into a "source
only" system, everything goes straight to hell in a zip file.

>> And, again, it's also largely responsible for why Windoze sucks so much.  
>> ... it's a minor kind of miracle the thing ever works at all.
> 
>   Does it work at all?  ;-)

  Alas, yes, it does.  If it was flat-out, dead-in-the-water broken I'd have
a much easier time pitching Linux.  :-/

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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