Re: OT Re: Advantage of debs?

[Jeff Sheinberg <jeffsh@erols.com>]

Hi,

Just a few words from a newbie bsd user and longtime Debian user.

1) .zip files are just dumb archives.  .deb files have
{pre,post}{remove,install} scripts, in addition to having a
centralized mechanism to deal with configuration files (conffiles)
that belong to a package that may also be mdified by the sysadmin.

2) make world - that is exactly the problem with bsd.  The whole
base system is tightly linked together - that's why it is so
difficult to cleanly upgrade bsd without re-installing from
scratch.  This is where Debian shines - the whole base system is
broken out into individual packages, which have defined
rquirements and dependencies, so thay they can be upgraded singly.

3) I agree that linux compat is the way to go for userland
programs.  IMO, the whole point of debian/bsd is to create a
coherent debian system using the bsd kernel _along with_ the base
bsd system (newfs, fdisk, disklabel, fsck.ufs, various console
utilities, sysinit scripts, etc) being composed of debian
packages.

HTH,
-- 
Jeff Sheinberg  <jeffsh@erols.com>