Le 27.08.2013 13:29, Ralf Mardorf a écrit :
On Tue, 2013-08-27 at 21:16 +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:On 8/27/13, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:> You're free to consider the distros you mentioned as the best distros, > but by doing this you miss a basic approach of FLOSS. There isn't such> as a commercial competition, or radical political model. What you say does not make sense. You are free to ignore most (or all) of what I say, and to make assumptions about things I have supposedly considered or said. Free to do so, but not useful...What branch of Debian do you recommend to contribute in development ofimportant Linux userspace projects?I explained that you can't do that, if you experience a dependency hell or an unstable environment. To contribute that way users and developers need stable up-to-date releases of software + sometimes newer releases than the current stable releases. Debian doesn't provide a stable branch that is up-to-date, in sync with stable releases from upstream, even theunstable branches of Debian don't provide this.Wouldn't you call this a drawback for the evolution of Linux, while ithas less, if any advantages to go this way?
Is there is any distro with binaries from "trunk/master" ( depending on if you prefer svn or git ;) ) up to date? It would be quite strange, but sounds nice.
I think that source distros can have such a system, but they are really hard to install, and for all other distros, I think users... coders, just sync with the repo of the libs they need, if they need the latest development package, and then compile the stuff themselves. On Debian, you have no real choice, since some libs ( sfml or wxwidgets for example ) does not have the latest version in binaries... In facts, I only had, for now, to use source repositories for something like 3 libs: wxwidgets, for the unstable versions ( 2.9.x ), libbullet, because it is not in Debian's repos ( IIRC ), and pluma-framework, for same reason.
On those libs, wxwidgets 2.9.x is not stable, so I would avoid to use it to create stuff for production environments. It's API may change tomorrow, and imply lot of work to adapt (it is not probable, but it is possible). Other 2 libs just lacks from the Debian's repo, but since Debian have a very huge package collection, is not it more likely for me to find my libs in Debian than in other distros with smaller package collection?
And for SFML... I'm using 1.6 for now. I should use 2.0 or 2.1, but... I just do not like it's design and API*. Also, exceptions are almost not used, which imply that I have to encapsulate the calls to the lib anyway, so switching version of even library will be easy: I'll just need to rewrite implementation of my "low level" classes, which is really fast to do. So, for the young SFML lib, not having the last version is not so problematic for me, but, yes, Debian does not have the last stable version of that particular library.
Finally, usually, libraries have some compatibility between versions, the more recent will support all features and API of older ones. Except for major releases, or for bad libraries that you should maybe think twice before using them. It means that it's better to work with older libs, if you do not require more recent features, to target more systems. As often when you try to write portable stuff, you can not use all bleeding edges of all targets.
To conclude, I think that Debian is excellent for programming, because of the ton of packages it have, and because when the coders needs the latest version of a lib, they are usually good enough with computers to clone/compile it ( but I admit that I am often very lazy too, so I try to avoid doing that. This is one of the reasons I no longer use windows for my desktop: on Debian, no need to compile and install stuff myself. Almost never.) .
*:SDL is, imho, better on that, even if I am a C++ programmer which really love OOP and exceptions... I feel like SFML uses OOP to hide stuff which may be useful for real programming. A problem ( not fixed in more recent versions AFAIK ) I recently had which is a nice example, is that I had a network error, and the lib only gave me the indication that there were an error. Yeah. Nice. There is an error, but you have no way to know which one... fun. Or not. Luckily, C gives perror to print the real error on screen, but hey, why does the SFML lacks function to say what went wrong? SDL is better, it have such facility, with SDL_GetError(). Of course, it does not handle network, but the nice point of libs which only handle one thing is that they can focus and often handle it better. I hate frameworks ( yes, it means that I hate Qt, too.), really. I prefer UNIX philosophy: one tool for one thing, and combine tools to have a "framework" which only does what you really needs.