Linux

[Nigel Sollars]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2001, Thomas Mondoshawan Tate wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 12:28:20AM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> > Am 26. Sep, 2001 schwätzte Thomas Mondoshawan Tate so:
> > 
> > > My own brew. Although technicially it's Linux From Scratch, but I've made so
> > > many changes to it I'd hardly call it such. The reason: less bloat, less
> > > dependencies, it runs what I want and not what the creators want, and
> > > upgrading portions of the system isn't as time consuming as it would be
> > > under a package based system. Eg: if I need to update libc, all I have to do
> > > is download, ./configure, make, make install, and I'm done -- no broken
> > > dependencies anywhere. Albeit, this kind of distro is not for those with
> > > heart conditions or those who are new to Linux since it's source-level
> > > "package management" feature requires a pretty heavy understanding of how
> > > the packages fit together.
> > 
> > Install the base system.
> > 
> > Decide what you want.
> > 
> > Setup sources.list.
> > 
> > # apt-get update
> > # apt-get install <devel_environment>
> > # apt-get install pentium-builder # forces pentium optimized compilation[1]
> > # apt-get -b source foo # automagically builds foo from the source package
> > 
> > If that bitches about something not being available, then:
> > 
> > # apt-get -b source something
> > 
> > There's also 'apt-get build-dep foo' that will get the binary packages
> > needed for build dependencies.
> > 
> > ciao,
> > 
> > der.hans
> > 
> > [1] Certainly things could be tweaked for auto optimization for other
> > environs as well.
> 
> I don't doubt the fact that apt-get is a useful and incredibly powerful tool
> for package management, but I've got a question for you: if compilation
> of a particular package fails, what does it do?
> 
> RPM tried this idea a while back with source RPMs. Unfortunately, virtually
> every time I attempted to build one of those suckers, the durn thing would
> explode with a compilation error, so I'd have to build the package from
> source myself. This created a discrepency in the package database -- RPM
> didn't know I had installed package "foo", but I really had from source.
> 
> The only problem I really have with automated package management systems is
> their inability (from what I've seen so far -- I've not had experience with
> apt-get yet, so correct me if I'm wrong) to control the compilation process
> with the _users_ preferences and the inability to recover from a compilation
> error.
> 

oh the woes of Package management ,,, thank the powers that be for
Slackware and tar.gz ....

Nige
>