[aclug-L] Flame bait... (distribution question)

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Perhaps I'm opening up a can of worms here, but I'm wondering what other
people's thoughts on this are.  And how others are handling it.

I know a lot of you are running Debian, some are running RedHat, and there's
a couple with other distributions.

I tried several of them when I was first getting started and the one that
ended up staying on my machine was Slackware.  It seemed fairly intuitive
for me, so I kept it.  Since then I've set up a couple of RedHat systems,
and now I'm working on a Debian system.  What I'm finding is that almost
everything in terms of really current stuff only comes in tarballs and rpms.
For example, I wanted the lasted version of XFree86, no deb files available
for it (except some experimental builds a Debian developer made, which took
awhile to locate).  I wanted the new Gnome 1.0...rpms...no debs.
Enlightenment?  NO debs (well, actually debian.org had them in the slink
directories, but they weren't on enlightenment.org)

Are all you Debian users 6 months behind on stuff (the last frozen release)?
Are you getting source for these things and compiling them yourself?  Are
you running development versions of Debian (slink (until today), potato)?
It just seems like when there's a package manager that you'll eventually end
up shooting yourself in the foot if you have to subvert it by installing the
stuff that's not packaged in your package system of choice.  It also appears
that the only packages people are doing of really up to the minute stuff are
rpm packages. I like the concept of Debian.org (totally free), but I'm
seriously thinking about going back to RedHat because of the availability of
current packages.  Slackware'll keep track of the tarball installations for
you, so that might be an option too.

Greg

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