Re: How would I get debian unstable?
On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 11:30 AM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 04:48:48PM +0200, Heikki Levanto wrote:
>> Sorry if I over react, but I am a bit allergic to anyone claiming something
>> is "fundamentally the wrong way to do" almost anything. I guess most of the
>> ways have their justifications for some situations.
>
> It's inefficient, and the vast majority of arguments for the design are
> incorrect since it doesn't actually accomplish what people claim it is
> supposed to accomplish. You end up with less well tested software,
> (due to lots of variation in configurations and compile options), lots
> of potential for bugs (due to people playing with compiler options they
> don't understand), and the rather vocal (although probable minority of)
> users who believe that because they compiled it themselves on their CPU
> it must automatically run faster than if someone else compiled it for
> the same CPU.
>
> I am an opinionated bastard (although I believe I have valid reasons for
> my opinions) and I think gentoo is a stupid waste of time with zero
> purpose for existing and all you learn from it is how much time you can
> waste compiling software, and you only learn that lesson when you stop
> using gentoo. Everything else you could have learned quicker and better
> using something like Debian if you really had an interest in learning
> how to mange compilation and optimization of software and the overall
> system. I imagine most gentoo users will think I am wrong, at least
> until the day they move on and realize their mistake.
In my (also opinionated!) view, what would have been the Real Better
Thing would be if Slackware (which always had some affinity for
BSD-like approaches to things such as init) had, instead of staying
with Patrick Volkerding managing packages as a proprietor (he is
dubbed, after all, the "Slackware Benevolent Dictator for Life"),
adopted, DIRECTLY, the BSD Ports mechanism for managing packages.
Had that happened, then those with an affinity for building from
source would have The Same System that is being managed (quite
competently) by the BSD folk, and, in my (opinionated!) view,
Slackware would be of MUCH more significant public interest today, as
its upgrade and deployment mechanisms would have progressed along with
BSD, and provided a much better bridge between the communities.
In that context, there would have been no need for Gentoo to emerge at all.
Note that I haven't said anything about "recompiling everything
everywhere all the time;" note that Ports happily lives alongside
pkg_add, which allows deploying binary packages too. (Which I believe
get built using Ports.)
>> I learned a lot from the year I installed and run Gentoo on my desktop. That
>> experience was the direct cause that I dared to to a Debian install over the
>> net, with not much help from the local people... Just stick in a CD (I think
>> it wasn't even Debian, possibly Knoppix), enable me to ssh in, and I took it
>> from there. Bit scary to tell it to reboot, but it did come up, and was a
>> functional system... I guess a Debian wizard would have done it with just
>> Debian background, but walking through the Gentoo installation was a good
>> learning experience. (and maintaining the system for a while too, although
>> that was what convinced me to switch back to Debian).
>
> I learned a lot moving to Debian about how to do things right (or at
> least better than any other system I have used).
I learned quite a bit the time I upgraded Slackware from a.out to ELF.
There's a certain kind of learning that falls out of doing some
similarly intrusive system upgrade by hand; after having done that
once, somewhat badly, and finding that Slackware didn't cope with the
change terribly well, I migrated to Red Hat, which coped with that
migration better (albeit via a complete reinstall), and that was, in
effect the cause for people leaving Slackware in droves, and adopting
Red Hat in even greater quantity.
It's not something I'd want to do by hand ever again - there are
plenty enough problems *that interest me* that I am perfectly happy to
let the "Debian aggregate consciousness" cope with many of the
problems that *don't* interest me.
Fighting with compiler flags, the "Gentoo Ricer" thing, doesn't
interest me in the slightest...
--
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting different results." -- assortedly attributed to Albert
Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Rita Mae Brown, and Rudyard Kipling
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