packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)

[ichel Talon]

"Lewis, Todd" <todd.lewis at xxxxxx> wrote in
news:B025A06E5B925043A22D9F73EAF2899B099C46DF at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 


> I made the userspace a.out -> elf transition on a debian box by firing
> up dselect and pressing the "enter" key 7 times.  What would have
> happened if I had installed a monolithic library package and then
> manually deleted include files?  They'd be put right back in.  You
> want a package manager that you can work with, not that you ignore or
> circumvent. 
> 
> Or, at least, that's what I want, and with Debian I have it.
> 

Amen.
By the way there are people here who have survived the transition a.out
-> elf in FreeBSD without major trouble. In fact without any trouble at
all. I know several persons , including myself who have done strange
things to their Debian installation by firing dselect. I have better
things to do that learning the fine points of dpkg, dselect, aptitude,
apt-get, apt-cache, apt-source, etc. each with myriad of options in
order to install a package on my machine. If you are happy of being a
virtuoso of these things, all the pleasure is for you. I doubt very much 
that *BSD users would like to go this route, and i know several Linux
users who return happily to Slackware.

Concerning people who run 5 operating systems on a 10 Gigs disk, i see
that Matt Dillon envisions to remove floppy support for installs, or
support for emulated floppy on cdroms, hence old style PCs are banned
from the discussion  apparently. This being said, if people think that
having support for installation without include files and without
documentation is a good thing, without causing trouble to people who
like to have the perl documentation when they want to use perl, or like
to be able to compile their programs without chasing devel packets
everywhere, installing them in their home, modifying CPPFLAGS and
LDFLAGS, etc. i don't see any objection to that.I simply think it has no 
utility at all.