Re: Considering Debian

[Pietro Cagnoni <pcagnoni@mclink.net>]

> David (and all),
> 
>         Thanks for the reply. The part about mixing hand built stuff with pacages
> in concerning as I do this quite often. The number of available packages is
> encouraging but, nonetheless, I know occasions will arise. I've had to
> build/install by hand X, glibc, postgres, the kernel, gcc, freeamp, and
> others because of needing bleeding edge versions that fix bugs or because,
> in debugging the current version, I needed a non-stripped binary.
>         Although the automatic installation abilities of apt sound nice, I find
> that I usually want to actually download the, in my case, RPM so that I can
> use it on multiple machines. That is, I question the benefit of this for me.
> 
>         Anyway, I wall continue to explore this and, once again, thanks for the
> info.

my 2E-2$:

1) if you keep your custom stuff in /usr/local and don't install the
corresponding deb package you won't have problems;

2) you can use apt-get source to get the package source, apply your
fixes and recompile (even with -g) the .deb file to install it on other
machines (and remember to send the fix to the mantainer!);

3) you can usually find almost-bleeding-edge stuff in testing;

4) give debian a try anyway!

pietro.