developer's install (wishlist)
So as a result of this hotplug problem, I've been through the install
for sarge a couple of times in the last few days, and this last one was
the most painfull install I've ever done (I've been running my own linux
box for 9 years now). When it gives you a choice for what kind of
machine to install (e.g. desktop, file server, manually select packages,
etc.) it would be really nice if one of those choices was "development
machine". I selected "desktop" once, and it installed gigabytes of
stuff I'm never going to use, and not very much in the way of what I
would consider mission-critical tools.
For example, it was missing at least the following:
gcc
manpages-dev
make
g++
cvs
termcap-compat (for running emacs in -nw mode)
libc6-dev
xlibs-dev
Now that's all fine and good if you're up to date with your IT, but when
my gcc barfed because it couldn't find stdio.h, it was not immediately
obvious to me which package takes care of that (as I've never had any
linux install not include libc and friends before). It also took me a
good half-hour of research for me to figure out that emacs couldn't run
in no-window mode because it needed the termcap compatibility package.
In short, it would be nice if the installer had a category that would
leave the box set up for happy hacking (preferably without all the
office/"productivity" bloat, too).
- martin
Reply to: