On 12/3/05, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano <nando@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 17:28 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > On 12/3/05, Brian Dunn <job17and9@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > So does anybody out there have the best of all worlds?
> > > good free documentation, reliable hardware support,
> > > binary packaging, a fast audio kernel, and config
> > > files that don't get re-written by some user friendly
> > > script somewhere that would be oh so convinient except
> > > for the whole doesn't work thing?
> > >
> > > If your system works the way you want it too most of
> > > the time, i want to hear your opinion.
> > >
> > > gratefull,
> > > Brian
> > >
> >
> > I have two opinions:
> >
> > 1) If I want *exactly* what Fernando provides on the Planet site, no
> > more and no less, then PlanetCCRMA is the best I know of. It's well
> > supported in the audio area by a great guy. It has a good mailing list
> > with helpful people. (Of which I hope I'm one once in awhile anyway.)
> > Overall very positive, but it has two downsides:
> >
> > a) If you need ANYTHING that's not part of the Planet apt system then
> > be prepared for RPM hell. At least that's my experience. Email, DVD
> > stuff, etc.
>
> Hmmmm, I'd dare say this is a bit extreme :-)
Yeah, most probably you are correct, but it's my unfortunatel view of
the world of prepackaged distros. They work really well when I use
exactly what they provide. As soon as I go outside of that boundry
they get dodgy in my experience.
>
> I'm not saying this is easy, of course.
> I'm not saying that it is better or greater than other distros, either.
> I'm not saying that I can be objective :-) ;-) :-p
As objective as anyone about distro religion and you have 100x more
rights to speak you mind based on the work you've done.
>
> The ammount of work depends on what "anything" is. Anything that is in
> Fedora Core should be easy (includes email I guess).
Yes, there are many good solutions for email clients. I should not
have included this.
> Anything in other
> apt/yum repositories is usually fine.
This is where I ran into many problems and eventually got put off.
> If you want to build your own
> packages from source you will need to install the required development
> packages and maybe that is what you mean by "RPM hell[*]", but I imagine
> that should be the case in other distros as well - unless they don't
> make a separation between base and developer packages, perhaps that's
> the case with gentoo. You may run into stumbling blocks if whatever you
> are trying to build depends on newer versions of core packages than the
> ones provided by the base distro, that can of course be a problem.
That is the problem I ran into many times. I got started with some app
on Gentoo and built, for instance, Aqualung. The Aqualung guys used
whatever library they wanted to use, and I had no problem finding it
on Gentoo. Aqualung worked. Then I wanted to build it on FC and found
that the library didn't exist. You would look into installing some
RPM, but maybe it didn't come from the same depository I was getting
everything else. I start changing apt setup files to get stuff, then
forget I've made changes, then download stuff the next day that maybe
I shouldn't have downloaded and after a few weeks somethign gets
flakey.
Clearly this sort of experience is driven by my lack of structure and
background in properly administering a Linux machine. I'm sure that FC
works well for folks who know what they are doing. (I'm not part of
that group.) That said, I still have one FC2/Planet machine here. It's
working quite well and probably will for years to come if I don't
change things.
>
> YMMV...
> -- Fernando
>
> [*] usually "RPM Hell" was meant to describe the situation in which you
> want to install an isolated package (an RPM in the case of rpm based
> distros), and it requires another package you don't have, and after
> finding it it requires another, and so on and so forth. This particular
> situation is old history, these days you can use dependency resolvers
> such as apt, yum or smart to resolve dependencies automatically for
> you.
>
yep.
Received on Mon Dec 5 00:15:04 2005
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