development tools and non-free drviers

[Michael Shigorin]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 03:08:49AM -0700, Scott wrote:
> >>chatting with a Fedora Core 4 user recently and he said
> >>something to the effect that it was "lame and inexcusable"
> >>that Ubuntu didn't include these in the default installation.
> >Well it's his own lame problem that Fedora user needs gcc that
> >bad anyways ;)
> Why is it lame?

Because "that bad".  So as to demand for it in _default_ install.

I really hated Red Hat for the extremely vast brain damage caused
by the fact that the only more or less sane package manager in
RHL was Anaconda [...] since that provoked people to do full
installs (b/c otherwise they got into the infamous "dependency
hell" which was actually solved *long* ago elsewhere).  I've seen
way too much "redhat servers" with X11, Gnome and a boatload of
other erm... extra software desperately needed on a *server* with
all of its privileged helpers and ugly buggy code.

So I maybe understand *why* he demands this but it's just lame.
They have apt-rpm and yum for long enough to fix themselves.

> I needed it when I used Fedora a year or so ago. And I 
> need it now that I've switched to Ubuntu.

I need it on a home system, on build (v)servers; I don't have
it on a notebook (it wasn't slated for standalone development
though apt-get install gcc happens at times) and on any of
production servers.  It's my habit, it might be just as lame
as "having gcc by default" but I stand by it being not when
talking of servers and seem to argue when talking of _desktop_
distro.

Fedora isn't "desktop" or "server" distro, even if used as both.
It's a core [dump], Red Hat Linux x.0 forever.  At least presently.
As much as I recognise the work they do.

> Well unless and until (and this is even more true with Ubuntu
> than Fedora) Linux distros include every possible package a
> user wants, stuff like "build-essential" will be very much in
> demand.

No, no, no.  It's going to be Slackware.  Please do a mind
experiment on installing e.g. beep-media-player on a clean Ubuntu
install _plus_ build-essential.

The guy sitting at home that asked good questions and actually
listened to the answers was going to get right into this mess of
de^H^Hconstruction -- hope he still did get it right.  Or will.
:)

You can try to babelfish this article that emerged from that
thread (but I highly doubt that it will grok the words play):
http://www.linux.kiev.ua/ru/docs/articles/linux-soft/

> I've come across quite a few "howtos" for creating Debian
> packages for Ubuntu (since the packages one would be creating
> aren't in Ubuntu's repositories).   One of the first
> instructions is "sudo apt-get build-essential".

But it's not everything, hence my objection.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike at altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/