The joys of Linux package management

[mdlbear]

Here's a blog post from Mark Pilgrim, who switched to Linux a year ago (from Mac) and was warned "You'll be tweaking MORE, configuring MORE, installing MORE because NOTHING is as packaged and polished. ... Enjoy your time with Linux, and when the endless Google searches to fix some miniscule package dependancy version problems finally drive you away, you will of course be welcomed back."

Well, it's a year later, and he concludes his post with...

In 2006, the only thing I had to compile on Ubuntu was Mplayer. (Oh yeah, and Supertux.) At the end of 2006, I switched from Ubuntu to Debian. In 2007, I don't compile anything at all. (Especially since I discovered the Debian-Multimedia repository. Weekly builds of Mplayer, Mencoder, Ffmeg, libavcodec, and libavformat. Professionally packaged, for multiple platforms. If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry about it; it means a lot to me.) Let me repeat that: I. Don't. Compile. Anything. I have 902 packages installed, and 0 compilers. Everything I need is already packaged.

Enjoy your time with Linux, and when the endless Google searches to fix some miniscule package dependancy version problems finally drive you away, you will of course be welcomed back.

One year later, I look back on comments like this, and I just laugh. Sorry, Anonymous Commenter, you couldn't have been more wrong. You got it exactly backwards. When your operating system finally comes with a package management system that is both comprehensive and extensible, you will of course be welcomed... to the 1990s. In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy my time with Linux.

(From Don Marti -- don_marti on LJ.)

He's right. I've spent a lot more than a year on Linux, and was a Unix user before that. I've tried most of the newer OSs and found them to be inferior, in most respects, every time -- I've never had a reason to switch. Oh, and...

   [steve 536] dpkg -l | grep ii | wc -l
   1175

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Mm. Probably true once you're familiar with it; I managed to right hose up a Kubuntu install by adding third-party repositories that purported to be designed for *ubuntu, badly enough that it was outside my knowledge to fix it.

[mdlbear]

When you do manage to get bad dependencies across multiple repos you can definitely get seriously screwed up, and even with a single repo you can have occasional problems. I wouldn't want to do dist-upgrade in a cron script the way Mark does.