distrowatch comment: "Ubuntu Breezy Badger - is it too dumbed down? "

[Michael Shigorin]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 09:07:51PM -0800, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> Of course, for his specific problem, I'm not clear why on his
> breezy box "apt-get install gcc" didn't work; thus he didn't
> ended up with a working version of gcc.  My only guess is that
> he tried "apt-get install gcc-3.4", and that's why he ended up
> with a gcc3.4 executable, which doesn't have a /usr/bin/gcc
> link pointing to

-=8-[   o   ]

Don't you have auto-adjusting alternatives for those?

I've been considering looking at Ubuntu more seriously.
But folks, we at ALT Linux have that working for *years*: you
install some gcc, it Just Works.  You install some another one
in parallel, and use update-alternatives to switch to it (quasi)
permanently or exporting CC/CXX to do one-shot/per-user.

And it's not only gcc, I've already marked quite a few similar
deficiencies.

It's not to mention that a pre-installed sandbox to do e.g.
development or support with an older branch is available in
*minutes*, including installing hasher[1], reading its docs,
initializing non-root chroot and getting a shell inside.

> since the default c compiler for Breezy is gcc4.
> Of course "apt-get install build-essential" is the ultimate
> answer to all this, but that specific piece of information is
> not so easy to find out when you are a new Ubuntu user.

Some people don't need gcc4.  They're to do job, not to debug
system compiler and fix what ain't really broken.  As far as
I can judge from patches needed, it's not production yet.

[1] ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/ldv/hasher

-- 
Misha,
quite disappointed about the buzz