On 10/25/07, Nate Duehr wrote: > From my experience, the most thouroughly tested and bugfixed dependency > tree is from Debian Linux. Dependency issues are by default, critical > release bugs in their policy. Somehow I tried Debian Etch once and I think Ubuntu is way better. > Other distros seem to take a more lazy approach to dependencies, overall. > > > I recently went through dependency hell on Ubuntu trying to install a C > > graphics library. Fortunately my extensive experience with pre YUM > > redhat helped me figure things out. > > Ubuntu is based off of Debian, but they tend to be lazier than Debian > when it comes to slight package manager "brokenness". So far I have not have any problems with Ubuntu as long as you do not use alien packages. > Just an observation from about 10 distros used both personally and > professionally since 1995... > > cvsup and the ports tree in FreeBSD is either a blessing or a nightmare, > depending on who uploaded last... Very true. I ran FreeBSD 6.2 Stable and I occassionaly track the kernel and userland (make world) but I simple could not get the port tree updated due to dependency problems. It is not worth upgrade gpsim from the port tree since it will pull all the other source packages like X/gtk/etc and often it is broken. So I give up on updating sdcc/gputils/gpsim using the port tree. > same thing with Gentoo "packages"... > their devs are in such a hurry that there's a lot of silly/simple > mistakes that any amount of QA by someone else would find... but they > also fix it very quickly. (Following Gentoo is like building a server > from Gentoo with any updates beyond a specific release is like standing > in a river of flowing quicksand... sometimes you can stand on it and > count on it, other times you're sinking rapidly.) > > I think if I needed things that Debian Stable or maybe Testing didn't > provide, I'd use Ubuntu LTS for a serious server machine right now, or > CentOS since it's based on the commercial RHEL varieties. Debian Stable == Ancient? I do not run servers so I do not really appreciate stability. That being said, I like Ubuntu 6.06 LTS so far. I tried CentOS 5 but I saw nothing specialy about it and it does not offer the same packages FC6/FC7 offers. > Fedora is a nightmare of teenagers uploading untested packages > into a system that has a weak package management scheme... > always broken/changing. I do not play with FC6 (now FC7) too much but it seems not that bad. > The main problems with "Desktop Linux" still today, is the ever-changing > nature of the different distros. You can't get any stability unless you > stick with very old (always slightly buggy -- so then you want to > upgrade, and the insanity begins...) applications. You can try versionless system like Arch Linux. I do not use it extensively due to the broken udev rules. Other than that, it is quite good. I am not so sure if stability is really a good or bad thing since Linux is relative young on the desktop arena. > Maybe it'll be stable enough in a few more years. I see that a major > milestone was crossed this week -- ATI is finally releasing binary-only > drivers for Linux for their accelerated graphics cards. Not so sure if I need to try this but binary-only packages tend to be problematic from time to time. > Linux is good for (cheap) servers, but I'll stick with Mac OSX for the > Unix desktop for the time-being... > I think you might be right that Mac OS X is better than Linux/FreeBSD for desktop users. But Mac tends to be more expensive and Apple is a closed company. I personally like to dual boot Windows and Linux. Windows+cygwin offers quite a good unix like envrionment. many open source programs and libraries got Windows port. Mac OS is often third-class citizen for many open source programs. Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist