Re: Why?!

[Zooko <zooko@wildgoose.tandu.com>]

Hi Charles.


Could you give us more information about some of the problems 
you've encountered?


You wrote:


> In linux I download the source,
> fight for hours with Makefiles and header files - or if I'm lucky
> ./configure will show me all the problems I need to fix in advance. OK, I
> can install .deb files (or .rpm files or whatever) instead but then I have
> to hope the package maintainer has kept everything up-to-date and hasn't
> mucked up - the number of times gzip complains about not being able to
> uncompress .deb files is amazing - and then I find someone's mucked up the
> dependencies and have to spend ages mucking around on ftp.debian.org (or
> mirrors) looking for stable-ish versions that will work and let me get on
> with it.


These are serious problems (i remember them well, from back 
before i adopted a Linux distribution), and Debian tries to 
provide a solution in the form of the dpkg/apt/dselect 
programs.  I'm not sure from reading this whether you tried the
Debian approach and still encountered problems, or whether you 
haven't tried the Debian approach yet.


So i have a Debian system running here (it's my primary 
system), and when i need a new package..  for example, let's 
say i want to install the documentation-management package 
called "doc++" (which i recently installed.  I strongly 
recommend this package to all C/C++ coders, by the way!)...


So i just type "apt-get update", then wait for a few minutes, 
then type "apt-get install doc++".  This handles all the 
problems of compilation, and dependencies (in the case of 
doc++, it will make sure you have a sufficiently modern version
of the standard C++ library installed).


I have very rarely encountered problems in the Debian 
packaging, and if i wanted to avoid such problems i could just 
run the stable branch of Debian instead.  (But i like finding 
these problems so i can report them, which is one of the 
reasons that i run the unstable branch.)


If this system isn't working for you for some reason, i'm sure 
we'd like to hear why not so that we can improve it.


Regards,

Zooko

http://www.xs4all.nl/~zooko