Which OS for notebook

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Wed Oct 6 15:25:16 UTC 2010


On Wed, 6 Oct 2010 16:42:40 +0000, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> I mean that the concept of maintaining a full set of binary packages 
> which has been verified by the distribution maintainers and remain
> usable for an extended period of time, combined with an effective
> binary upgrader (apt-get, aptitude), is light years ahead, for ease of
> use and convenience, to a rolling release style "bazar" like FreeBSD
> ports, combined with tools like portupgrade, which sort of work only 
> when you spend all your time running them daily, after having sacrificed
> a young virgin to the gods.

Erm... no. First of all, I have better uses for virgins, and then,
portupgrade -p is a very useful mechanism for binary updating of
installed applications. Sadly, not all applications CAN be installed
by or upgraded from binary packages, as those don't exist due to the
amount of available options that have to be set at compile time.
A well-known example is OpenOffice. The times when you could run
"pkg_add -r de-openoffice" to get a precompiled OpenOffice including
german localisation and dictionaries are over. There are also
restrictions that have their roots in laws, such as the prohibition
of codec distribution (yes, I know, that's totally idiotic from a
user's point of view), requiring programs like mplayer to be compiled
with certain options if you want the "illegal" (bah!) codecs that
make mplayer play everything. Oh, and another example might be X if
you want to run it the "traditional" way without HAL and DBUS.



> I concede that the FreeBSD way allows to have 
> very up to date ports, and to be in control of compilation options and
> so on. Personnally i don't have much use for these benefits.

I do share this opinion in many regards and settings. Binary installation
is a big advantage especially if you're low on resources. But
sometimes, you can't avoid it.



> Even more,
> there are ports freezes, during the preparation of these releases,
> allowing to get a relatively coherent set of packages for the release.

VERY important for offline installations. You don't want bleeding-edge
broken programs there.



> One may imagine this is the first step in a similar strategy for the
> ports as for the base system.

Tools like portupgrade allow using the precompiled packages from the
Latest/ subtree as a means of upgrading without compiling.



> But in this very thread, most competent
> ports folks explain us that the first thing to do is throw away the
> ports tree which has been used in the release and consequently the
> packages which have been compiled with it, and preferably indulge in the
> daily ritual of running csup, and invoking the manes of portupgrade
> or portmaster, of course after having carefully read UPDATING.

Oh, this HEAVILY depends on your setting, on your requirements. For
a system where "install once, then keep using" is the prime directive,
the approach you mentioned does not fit well. For a system that you
want to test the latest software, where you INTENDEDLY want beeding-edge,
it's the best way.

You could make up the following associations:
	RELEASE system - pkg_add from RELEASE/ - ports tree from CD
	STABLE system - pkg_add from Latest/ - ports updated per portsnap
	CURRENT system - no pkg_add - ports updated per csup

Please don't see this list as a mandatory ruleset. Mixed approaches
may be the best solution in different settings.



> Beleive it or not, i click on an icon of my Ubuntu laptop, and get the
> same result without any further interaction.

Which *may* cause your system to break.

Don not understand this as an insult or claim. I have limited experience
with Linux, but those that I have, especially as a supporter of "newbies"
and "average users" show that Linux holds other kinds of confusion that
I don't want to describe here in detail.

FreeBSD is a system that always goes the SAFE ROUTE, because that is
what its users expect - and often REQUIRE.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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