[ale] free bsd vs. linux

[Dylan Northrup]

A long time ago, (15.03.03), in a galaxy far, far away, Chris Fowler wrote:

:=I've got one machine that refuses to run Linux.  I've installed FreeBSD
:=4.7 and it works great.  I have 2 idetical machines.  One has RH7.3 and
:=the other has FreeBSD 5.0. I can tell you that the Linux one is much
:=faster than the 5.0 box.  It maybe the 5.0 but I can definetly tell a
:=speed differnce between the two.

You do know that 5.0 is not the current "production" release, right?  If I
were going to do testing between two equivalent releases, I'd use RH 7.3 vs.
FBSD 4.7 or RH 8.0 vs. FBSD 5.0.

:=On the /usr/ports issue, I do not think it is much better than RPM hell.
:=I wanted to compile a aim client from /usr/ports.  It went as far as
:=compiling GNU make just to begin building the client.  I spent at least
:=an hour compiling dependencies so I could compile the aim client. You
:=would expect that a small program would equal small dependencies.  That
:=is just not the case.

Any open source X program has even odds of having a dependency on some
windowing toolkit or window manager (Qt, KDE, gnome, etc).  Those have their
own dependencies as well.  The goodness of /usr/ports is that those
dependencies are resolved automatically for you.  The badness of rpm is that
you have to track down the appropriate rpm version, download and install it
manually.  If you're using apt-get under Debian, this problem is not nearly
as pronounced, but you still run into the issue where there's a dependency
on a specific version of a library (or libraries) that you have to resolve
by either forcing the upgrade of the library (because inevitably there's a
package you have installed that relies on the earlier version of the
library), you don't install whatever package you were trying to install or
you try to install from source (in which case, why use a packaging system to
begin with?).

-- 
Dylan Northrup <*> docx at io.com <*> http://www.io.com/~docx/
"Harder to work, harder to strive, hard to be glad to be alive, but it's 
 really worth it if you give it a try." -- Cowboy Mouth, 'Easy'

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale