Re: How would I get debian unstable?
On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 11:45:39AM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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.
I don't miss anything about slackware. Especially the BSD init.
> 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.
I am not a fan of the BSD ports system. I think it is ancient and
outdated and hasn't progressed at all. If you want something that can
use both source and binaries, then look at fink, which uses debian
packages sources and tools, but supports pulling in sources and building
everything along with all needed dependancies. It is quite impressive.
I will stick with debian binaries myself though.
> 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.)
Still seems awfully primitive to me. :)
> I learned quite a bit the time I upgraded Slackware from a.out to ELF.
Yeah, that was interesting. I seem to recall SLS didn't want to move
away from the old system, which essentially made them irrelevant.
> 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...
Exactly. Let someone be an expert on a package and manage it. I will
worry about the things I really care about.
--
Len Sorensen
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