[clue-tech] Distro musings

[Matt Gushee]

Dennis J Perkins wrote:

> I've heard of Arch Linux.  What is distinctive about it?  What package
> manager does it use?

To my mind the most important characteristics are:

   * It's an i686-optimized binary distribution
   * Package maintainers try to provide the latest stable version of
     everything, though the interpretation of "stable" is a bit flexible
     --when there's room for doubt, newer versions tend to be favored
   * Arch explicitly avoids imposing an overarching framework or
     philosophy regarding where files live, how configuration is done,
     etc. Except for a few simple things like installing to /usr instead
     of /usr/local, packages are usually built as the upstream maintainer
     intended (one benefit of this is that most things work exactly as
     described in their manual pages, which is sometimes not the case on
     distros that do a lot of patching).
   * Package dependencies are (by custom) limited to packages that are
     really needed (vs., say, RedHat, where a package's dependencies tend
     to include everything you might need to use all of its features).
     This means that it's possible to install a package and not have it
     work as expected because it's missing some optional component ...
     that's probably the main reason Arch isn't great for newbies: you
     are expected to have some intelligence about what you install. But
     this approach certainly helps to eliminate bloat.
   * Distribution-specific stuff is kept to a minimum. If you know how
     Linux works in general, that's at least 80% of what you need to know
     about Arch.
   * Rolling releases. Though periodically a new "major version" comes
     out, most people just update over the net periodically (I generally
     update ~ once a week).

The package manager is pacman. It's peculiar to Arch; I find it a happy 
medium between the simplistic RPM and the know-it-all dpkg. It usually
does the right thing (e.g. pulling in dependencies) automatically, but 
you can easily override it when you need to.

-- 
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :