habits

[Michael Shigorin]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 05:00:32PM -0700, Scott wrote:
> >>My point still stands. It should be part of the default
> >>installation.
> >Hm, if someone would insist that way in ALT's mailing lists a
> >few people (including me) would honestly recommend staying on
> >RHL/FC for that matter.
> If Fedora core would go back to "unofficially embracing
> apt4rpm", I might consider it.

ALT is with apt-rpm (which is technically superior to apt4rpm)
since almost the beginning.

> Besides, in spite of what I find wrong with Ubuntu/Kubuntu,
> it's still the best out there as far as my needs are concerned.

So you might want to forgive some difference.  There's no such
thing as a perfect distro, I know maybe almost all of weak points
of the one I participate in.  And I don't suppose to flame Ubuntu
or try to coerce them into something of my mind because it, ahem,
looked funny in a test install while tweaking around.  I'd better
hang say here borrowing some nice ideas and thoughts floating
around (although lurking in devel lists is usually more fruitful),
and occasionally giving something in return (or hoping to).

Choose your non-ideal distro or a few and stick with them --
until there's next great thing which would outweigh even habits 
and community.

> But then, nothing is perfect and I'm all for putting my $.02
> in.  On some very rare occasions, my suggestions get
> implemented so not all is lost.  And I've yet to have an
> opinion that wasn't shared by many others when it comes to um..
> most anything actually. lol

:-)

> I've talked to a few "gurus" who were quite surprised that
> these tools were not part of a default install, and being that
> a number of packages in the repository are either out of date
> or just non-existent, 

Uh, so, erm, there's not enough packages?  Shame on Debian,
or Ubuntu, for that matter.  But you could help to package 
the rest of the world ;-)

> "./configure, make, checkinstall" has become a semi-regular
> activity.  I can't be the only one in this situation.  And I've
> seen a lot of "newbie" posts in the forums with "./configure:
> doesn't work!" etc.

Actually it's a feature. (I've explained above how one of such
newbies has recently quite thoroughly refreshed my thoughts on 
this particular topic; and why ISOs of extras are critical)

> And so, that's how I formed my opinion. :-) Now if Ubuntu would
> like to offer more frequent updates (not distro, just
> individual packages) as well as a better selection (notably
> missing - KDE themes/styles - and a number of "universe"
> packages are old and/or broken) then I'd have no need for
> compiling software from source anyway.  :-)

Well you can spend some more time and do packages, or switch 
the distro.

I've offered someone to go ahead and adopt blender from orphaned
(and maybe update it to new and shiny 2.40) when they've asked if
anyone could build it for latest stable.  I'd help that person 
but I already have enough packages to maintain (it's 123 pcs atm,
including apache, xmms and alsa userspace).

So it's just OK to help with the missing parts.  Even for us
blind monkeys. :-)

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