Installing Open Office / Perl updating
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From: tim1948 on 11 May 2010 01:57 On May 8, 10:49 am, ta...(a)lpthe.jussieu.fr (Michel Talon) wrote: > Bob Eager <rd...(a)spamcop.net> wrote: > > > Are you telling me that it WON'T take hours, and lots of swap space, to > > build OpenOffice on (say) Ubuntu? Because if you are, you're a liar. > > You don't run Ubuntu to have the stupidity of building OpenOffice > from source. I maintain that building ports from source is a huge loss > of time without any tangible benefit, and with very real drawbacks, the > main one being that no one can ensure the coherence of the packages > on a given machine. The idea of building from source may have appeared > cute several years ago, but clearly Gentoo and other source based > systems have failed. At least the OpenBSD people have recognised that. > > > > -- > > Michel TALON Occasionally I sleep. It took me six hours to build OpenOffice from ports, but I wasn't aware of what was going on :-)
From: Michel Talon on 11 May 2010 05:49 tim1948 <iconoklastic(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > > Occasionally I sleep. It took me six hours to build OpenOffice from > ports, but I wasn't aware of what was going on :-) As i discuss on the web page i have mentioned, the worst drawback of building from source is *not* the loss of time or electricity. It is the loss of coherence. When a "distribution" is provided in binary form, you have the proof that all packages exist (i.e. that there are not 10% of the ports that are unbuildable for various reasons) and, if the distribution is serious, that they work (or at least their main functions work, because nothing is 100% tested). In particular that all the chain of dependencies work and are coherent with the given package. If you upgrade your machine, you know for sure if all the required binary packages exist, before destroying your installation. Moreover, the distribution maintainers can be reasonably sure that users who report problems have the same packages thay have distributed, not packages customized by some cow boy who has compiled with -O3 to "enhance performance" at the price of introducing compiler bugs or other interesting and fine ideas. With source based systems, every one is basically on its own. The maintainers have a fragile relation with users, quality control necessarily suffers. This is basically the reasons why i think a "source based" system is a bad thing, and a "binary based" system is better. Of course the source based system has the reverse advantages, that is, is much easier customizable. For people who take advantage of this feature, this is perfect. For the other ones, i venture to say at least 90% of users, this is bad. -- Michel TALON
From: Indi on 11 May 2010 11:50 On 2010-05-11, Michel Talon <talon(a)lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote: > tim1948 <iconoklastic(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >> >> Occasionally I sleep. It took me six hours to build OpenOffice from >> ports, but I wasn't aware of what was going on :-) > > As i discuss on the web page i have mentioned, the worst drawback of > building from source is *not* the loss of time or electricity. It is the > loss of coherence. When a "distribution" is provided in binary form, > you have the proof that all packages exist (i.e. that there are not 10% > of the ports that are unbuildable for various reasons) and, if the > distribution is serious, that they work (or at least their main > functions work, because nothing is 100% tested). In particular that > all the chain of dependencies work and are coherent with the given > package. If you upgrade your machine, you know for sure if all the > required binary packages exist, before destroying your installation. > Moreover, the distribution maintainers can be reasonably sure that > users who report problems have the same packages thay have distributed, > not packages customized by some cow boy who has compiled with -O3 to > "enhance performance" at the price of introducing compiler bugs or other > interesting and fine ideas. With source based systems, every one is > basically on its own. The maintainers have a fragile relation with > users, quality control necessarily suffers. This is basically the > reasons why i think a "source based" system is a bad thing, and a > "binary based" system is better. Of course the source based system has > the reverse advantages, that is, is much easier customizable. For people > who take advantage of this feature, this is perfect. For the other ones, > i venture to say at least 90% of users, this is bad. > > > I hear PC-BSD fills that niche. -- Caveat utilitor, indi
From: Indi on 11 May 2010 11:52 On 2010-05-11, tim1948 <iconoklastic(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > On May 8, 10:49?am, ta...(a)lpthe.jussieu.fr (Michel Talon) wrote: >> You don't run Ubuntu to have the stupidity of building OpenOffice >> from source. I maintain that building ports from source is a huge loss >> of time without any tangible benefit, and with very real drawbacks, the >> main one being that no one can ensure the coherence of the packages >> on a given machine. The idea of building from source may have appeared >> cute several years ago, but clearly Gentoo and other source based >> systems have failed. At least the OpenBSD people have recognised that. >> > > Occasionally I sleep. It took me six hours to build OpenOffice from > ports, but I wasn't aware of what was going on :-) Exactly. I don't know how long it took on this machine, was busy with other things. -- Caveat utilitor, indi
From: Patrick Scheible on 11 May 2010 12:47
Indi <indi(a)satcidananda.16x108.merseine.nu> writes: > On 2010-05-11, Michel Talon <talon(a)lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote: > > tim1948 <iconoklastic(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > >> > >> Occasionally I sleep. It took me six hours to build OpenOffice from > >> ports, but I wasn't aware of what was going on :-) > > > > As i discuss on the web page i have mentioned, the worst drawback of > > building from source is *not* the loss of time or electricity. It is the > > loss of coherence. When a "distribution" is provided in binary form, > > you have the proof that all packages exist (i.e. that there are not 10% > > of the ports that are unbuildable for various reasons) and, if the > > distribution is serious, that they work (or at least their main > > functions work, because nothing is 100% tested). In particular that > > all the chain of dependencies work and are coherent with the given > > package. If you upgrade your machine, you know for sure if all the > > required binary packages exist, before destroying your installation. > > Moreover, the distribution maintainers can be reasonably sure that > > users who report problems have the same packages thay have distributed, > > not packages customized by some cow boy who has compiled with -O3 to > > "enhance performance" at the price of introducing compiler bugs or other > > interesting and fine ideas. With source based systems, every one is > > basically on its own. The maintainers have a fragile relation with > > users, quality control necessarily suffers. This is basically the > > reasons why i think a "source based" system is a bad thing, and a > > "binary based" system is better. Of course the source based system has > > the reverse advantages, that is, is much easier customizable. For people > > who take advantage of this feature, this is perfect. For the other ones, > > i venture to say at least 90% of users, this is bad. > > I hear PC-BSD fills that niche. To some extent. I'm using PCBSD 7.1.1. It's okay... except Firefox from the PBI has mysterious 2-minute pauses every so often. And there's a fair amount of applications that I want that don't have PBIs. So for them, it's no better than plain FreeBSD. PCBSD 8.0 is released, but x.0 releases are generally bad luck so I haven't upgraded. I've thought about changing to Ubuntu or something else, but I'm not really sure if it would be better or it just has better advocacy. This is for a desktop PC, not a laptop. -- Patrick |