[geeks] Whoo hoo... now this is a nice Linux

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Caleb Shay wrote:

> Well, my reason (and it may not be a good reason for everybody), is
> that I feel it gives me the best of both worlds.  That is, I have
> package management, so keeping track of what got installed where, what
> depends on what else, etc, is handled for me, but it gives me the
> flexibility of having built everything "by hand" the way I wanted to,
> ie I want <program name> built with <feature1> and <feature2>, but not
> <feature 3>, as opposed to being stuck with the features that the
> package maintainer decided I should have or risk breaking the
> dependency/package management system of the distro.

Okay, so a Linux distribution finally jumped on the ports/pkgsrc tree
bandwagon.  This is a Good Thing.

> l337 factor?  I've never really understood this whole mentality.

Well, from what I've seen, it's a "I'm running something that you
-can't-, you menial worm".  It gives the community a bad name.  That,
combined with the onward march of bloat/feature creep is why I got away
from Linux over a year ago.

> Doing everything yourself?  Hardly.  It's a package manager based
> system, it's just that the packages are source based rather than
> binary.

Hmm.  Okay.  I can't imagine what the local zealots are smoking, then.

> If I really wanted to do everything by hand I'd go back to my first
> love, Slackware.

Yum.  That was the first and last Linux distribution I ran.  I had a
short stint with RedHat, a -very- short stint with Debian, but I always
came back to Slack.

> I remember upgrading my libc5 Slack system to libc6/glibc2 "by hand",
> now THAT was a learning experience.

Especially when you learn that doing a "make install" into /lib on a
running system is a Bad Thing. :)

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  *) "Saying 8MB of RAM doesn't do as much anymore is
Thorndale, TX      (*  like saying a gallon of water holds more than it
                   *)  did in 1988."                    --George Adkins