Re: [9fans] x10

["Joel Salomon" <salomo3@cooper.edu>]

Geoff Collyer said:
> Actually there's another reason to choose Linux last (other than
> Windows): the distributions I've seen are just a collection of ~1,000
> packages and, if they even come with sources, you hope you can compile
> them all, but they demand different prerequisite library versions
> (often for little or no reason), some of which are incompatible and
> can't co-exist, so it becomes a major pain to construct a consistent
> source tree, for which you have running binaries, and which you could
> recompile all (or part) of.  The BSDs at least are integrated systems,
> maintained as systems, not packages, so they come with self-consistent
> sources, and you can compile them.  For programs that aren't part of
> the core system (``ports''), they let `make' figure out the
> dependencies (novel!) and drag in the necessary prerequisites and they
> usually build (occasionally the gratuitous overspecificity of version
> numbers bites one in the ass; it's a real problem in the BSD/Linux
> world).

Then there's gentoo ( http://www.gentoo.org/ ) -- Linux with a ports-like
system attached. I haven't the bandwidth to use it myself, but someone at
cooper I introduced it too uses it on his home network and loves it. He
VNC'd to his computer from school (shades of plan9) to show me an 'emerge
sync' in progress.

Couldn't get him hooked on plan9, though...

--Joel