On 05/27/2010 01:02 PM, Kyle Dassoff wrote: > It isn't Debian, but Arch is a nice distro as long as you don't mind > configuring more of the system on your own. I've been using Arch for a > while (as well as Debian). Arch has all the simplistic beauty that a core operating system should have. Packages are not much more than tarballs, not many, if any, default configs are built, and only a base install is made, you decide what to install for a working operating system after that. Runs lean, uses the BSD-style init, rather than SysV-init, and everything Just Works. Major drawbacks include a very basic shell-script for the installer, with no rescue mode, or ability to do any deep adjustments before installing. That would go against the simplicity. Packages aren't GPG-signed by their maintainers. They are however MD5 checksummed, but you and I know perfectly well, that a 3rd party MITM attack is perfectly plausible here, including the MD5 signature, and you would not be the wiser. Also, because of their anal retentive philosophy towards simplicity, Free Software is not in a separate repository from the non-free. It's all in one. > Gentoo is also a good choice [snip] Personally, I can't stand Gentoo, and I'm surprised it's been as successful as it has. But, I'll leave the rest of my opinions about Gentoo off list. > If you're looking for a ports-like system to run on top of Debian, you > can also check out NetBSD's pkgsrc. [snip] NetBSD is a beautiful operating system, and I ran it as a server for a long time, before getting tired of its lack of solid system administration utilities (for example, at the time, it didn't have any LVM support). It's networking stack can't be beat, the architectures it covers is massively impressive, it runs lean and it's snappy as hell. However, as beautiful as it is, it's still light years (any BSD really) behind any decent, capable GNU/Linux-based operating system, including Debian. However, because the thread is about a "ports like system for debian", two things come to mind: 1) Are you talking about a software system that installs software automatically, resolving dependencies? If so, dpkg and apt are your tools. 2) Are you talking about building packages from source? If so, Debian is not your option. It's entirely binary-based, and has good reasons for being so. You won't find a utility that compiles source-based packages on Debian, resolving dependencies, and installing as per FHS. -- . O . O . O . . O O . . . O . . . O . O O O . O . O O . . O O O O . O . . O O O O . O O O
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