[lug] There must be a better way

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "James" == James Alan Brown <James at jabcomp.force9.co.uk> writes:

I'm speaking for myself, not Red Hat.

James> Each company, it seems, has their own idea and way of creating
James> a Linux box and all of them seem to modify endless files to
James> reflect their view/logos and wishes regardless of what the end
James> user really wants.

There is no single list of end user wants.  No distribution will
satisfy everybody -- that's why there are 500 distributions to choose
from.  I think in general the major distributions do make an effort to
do what their users want.  That's certainly how it looks from the
(relative -- I usually don't work on the OS at all) inside.

James> RPM's from SuSE that wont work on Red Hat for example because
James> of diff file mods to the standard tar source files.

As an "upstream" package maintainer, I agree the current state is less
than ideal.  Occasionally I see bug reports for problems which are
introduced by the vendor (usually, to work around other bugs).  At the
same time, though, I have sympathy for the vendors (and, btw, when I
say "vendor" I include organizations like Debian).  They usually have
a limited amount of manpower to spend on the significant problems of
building a release.  So they occasionally err.  Generally speaking,
I've found the vendors to be fairly rational and responsive to
upstream maintainer complaints.

James> I cant help but wonder if it would be possible to make up a
James> bootable CD with its root mounted containing a formatter,
James> /bin/bash, file utils, all the include headers and C compilers
James> needed to format a clean hard drive and install the base linux
James> system then un-tar each required package and compile it up as
James> you go?

I think that would be possible.  I think it takes about 24 hours to
build a complete distribution from scratch (ymmv, especially if you
have a killer machine, or if you, like many people, don't want every
package).  Still, I understand the *BSD folks do this.

James> Has any one else thought about this and would like to comment?

The ideal situation would let us effortlessly share packages between
distributions.  Unfortunately there are various forces in play which
ensure that it will never happen.

My own experience is that binary packages represent a huge improvement
over installing everything from source.  Networked package databases
(like Debian's `apt' or the Red Hat Network, which I still haven't
tried -- don't tell) represent another big advance over that.  But
then, I like to run a fairly stable system.  I don't often yearn for
the cutting edge programs, other than the ones I'm working on.  I only
upgrade my whole OS every two years or so.  I gather many people
upgrade rather more frequently.

Tom