ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Bill McGonigle]

On Feb 25, 2007, at 17:22, Ben Scott wrote:

>  However, the "build most things from source" solution is not without
> issues itself.  It it slower than binary packages (imagine installing
> the first GNOME package this way -- please wait while we build the
> world from source).

For a point of reference, I've got my Mac setup this way with 'fink',  
a wrapper layer on top of apt-get that makes it feel more yum/RPM- 
like (background - it's the thing that lets you easily use all of the  
open source tools on OSX).  Starting from a bare system doing 'fink  
install gnucash' (with all of gtk and its cohorts) took about a day  
and a half to complete, running on a 2GHz Core2Duo machine with 2GB  
of RAM and me not using it much.

 From the aspect of maintainability it does work really well, and  
empirically doesn't provide much in the way of challenges beyond  
using a binary-only system.  I haven't seen breakage because I wound  
up with the wrong version of a library or a conflict in about 4 years  
of using it.  Part of this is probably because it keeps itself in a  
parallel root (/sw) and you have to implicitly install -compat  
packages to use system library versions rather than its own.

I keep hearing about a binary mode that it has, but aside from the  
initial bootstrapping it hasn't been worthwhile to figure out why  
it's not on.

-Bill

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