[CLUE-Tech] Arch Linux: Thumbs Up!

[Matt Gushee]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 07:45:14AM -0600, Mike Benavides wrote:
> Matt:
> Have you tried Debian Mepis?  They use the cutting edge packages and 
> kernels.  They are using their brand of Sarge and Installation is quiet 
> good.  Dependencies seem to be handled quit well with and much better 
> system(apt-get) than rpms used by Fedora or any other Red Hat 
> look-a-like.  The group at Mepis is West Virginia are doing a good job.

Hey, Mike, thanks for the suggestion, but nope. First of all, I've
already switched, and I'm not going to switch again for a while.
Secondly, I know about Debian's packaging system; it was one of the
major reasons I switched from RedHat to Debian 3 years ago. And it's one
of the major reasons I've gotten tired of Debian. See, I couldn't use
apt-get anymore, because every time I tried it would propose to remove
91 packages. It wouldn't tell me which ones or why, and there didn't
seem to be any way to prevent the packages from being
deleted--positively Kafkaesque.

I've come to believe that the big distributions try to do too much. I
used to just think that about RedHat--how they try to automate
everything, which helps a lot of people but causes disasters for a
significant minority. Debian is different, and in some ways better, but
I think it tries too hard to standardize the system. Standards are great
when they are consistently applied and well understood; otherwise they
just add complexity. For example, Debconf is a great idea, but only a
minority of packages actually use it ... and how do you tell which ones?
And even when a package doesn't use Debconf, it often has some
Debian-specific configuration method, so that you can't rely on the
program's man page to tell you how to configure it.

And then there's the issue of creating packages. Having written a few
programs, I always thought I'd like to create DEBs of them. But in three
years, I never learned how to create a Debian package. I just never had
the energy to wade through 1000s of pages of mostly-obsolete
documentation.

Now contrast that with Arch, on the other hand: if the manual page for
'foo' says you configure the program by editing '/etc/foo.conf,' then by
golly, that's exactly what you do. And if you want to create packages,
(assuming you know generally how to compile software and know a bit of
shell scripting) you can learn the basics in about 10 minutes. In fact,
I installed Arch on my first box Saturday night, and created my first
two Arch packages on Sunday night.

I didn't mean for this to turn into an anti-Debian rant. I don't hate
Debian; it has served me well for 3 years. But, you know, I'm an
experienced Linux user, and don't need much hand-holding. I want a
simple system that *works the way I want it to.* That's why I started
using Linux in the first place.


-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee at havenrock.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)