On Sat 05 Apr 2008 at 13:08:04 +0000, Duncan wrote: > dual Opteron box, so quad-core, I realized that for most stuff, compile > time is now almost trivial, compared to the other stuff, figuring out > what's new, config, etc, that comes along with installs/upgrades and that > people have to do regardless of whether they use a binary or source based > distribution. As a result of this personal experience, I'm now convinced
I'll take this opportunity to describe what I'm using. I use pkgsrc, which is as the name implies, packages in source form (although binary packages are also available). It is "cross-platform", it works on the various BSDs, but also on Linux, Solaris, Darwin (Mac OSX), QNX and a few others. In principle it is a bunch of makefiles, so that if you do "cd news/pan; make install" it fetches the necessary sources, applies any porability patches, compiles and installs. After of course any dependencies are installed. The difficulties come of course when something needs to be upgraded. There are several strategies for that, traditionally the "remove everything, then recompile" which isn't very satisfying on a production system. The solution that I use is called "pkg_comp". This basically creates a chrooted sandbox in which copies of the OS and packages are installed. In it, one can use the "remove, then recompile" strategy without harm. From each package one then creates a "binary package". After everything has recompiled, I can quickly update my real system from the generated binary packages. > Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. -Olaf. -- ___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert -- You author it, and I'll reader it. \X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse. _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
