Re: Linux Vs. FreeBSD

> This admittedly was probably a softball example. Firefox is perhaps one of
> the most widely used open source apps out there, and the Mozilla foundation
> has made a lot of effort towards making it easy to install.
>
> Not every app has the same level of refinement as Firefox though, and a lot
> of them usually just release sources and let the distros pick and choose.
> This approach typically is a lot more fragmented than say, the BSD's (and I
> never thought I could bring this one back to full circle), but that's
> where the distros come into play. If you're not fond of you're distribution's
> system of package management, toss it and get another one.

Very interesting, thank you for the information. I guess what I really
dislike is a certain aspect of the Linux *philosophy*, not a certain
aspect of the Linux *operating system*. Maybe I'll try using a Debian
install with Yast on it. I use suse now only because I love Yast as a
configuration tool, although its package management sucks, more than
anything because not everything is pre-packaged for suse. I actually
had a Knoppix Debian-like install, but ditched it for lack of GUI
configuration tools before I realized that Yast (by far my favorite GUI
configuration tool) had been ported to Debian.
>
> > This is my idea of a good method of program installation, assuming I
> > understand it correctly. It works on any distro, has no dependency
> > hell, does not rely on any form of a centralized repository, does not
> > take forever, and installation can be done either by a simple command
> > or a few simple GUI actions in Nautilus or Konqueror. It wastes a
> > little disc space and RAM by bringing things that may already be there,
> > but who cares? Simple economics dictates that the resource that is
> > most plentiful should be most exploited, and in this case, RAM and hard
> > drive space are much more plentiful than the user's time and
> > willingness to put forth effort to conserve RAM and hard drive space.
>
> Another possible reason for Mozilla's releasing in this manner is that most
> of their codebase is somewhat difficult to compile from source (speaking from
> experience here; y'all can go ahead and laugh at me).

Even moreso for Windows. I've tried several times because I wanted an
optimized build that would be more responsive to run on some old
hardware. It left me with a very bad taste for compiling, and I
eventually gave up. I'm gonna definitely sympathize with you here.

> For something like
> Fluxbox, where it's just a manner of ./configure, make, make install, packaging
> like this is a waste of time.

You're right, although packages like this are few and far between. I
have a success rate of well under 50% getting things to compile and
install by doing untar, ./configure, make, make install *without*
reading documentation, fetching dependencies, manually configuring
build environments, or doing anything else I shouldn't have to do just
to install a package. Also, being somewhat knowledgeable, this
procedure seems fairly obvious to me when installing a package from
source. For simple source-only packages, it would be nice for true
novices if Gnome and KDE had some little GUI program that did this for
you, although it would be even nicer if they were offered in binary
tar.gz form, since the binary dependencies certainly wouldn't be any
worse than the source dependencies, and preferably with all non-trivial
(i.e. dependencies that are not included in almost every distro
out-of-the-box) dependencies included even if that wastes a little
bandwidth, disc space, etc.

> And lord knows what the hell would happen if
> kernel org starts putting out binaries.

This is a totally different animal. When I speak of packages, I mean
userland desktop packages. All but the most advanced users will
install a ready-made distribution with all the low-level stuff
basically done for them. The point I was trying to make is that they
should not be dependent on the whims of their distribution maintainer
for the ability to obtain easy-to-install versions of userland desktop
apps.

.

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