On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 06:46:26PM +0100, Tony Earnshaw wrote:
...
| Contention: Exim is not for .deb or .rpm people. Or, they'll have to
| become "proper" Unix people.
...
| Exim needs that RTFM mentality, that .deb and .rpm people just don't
| have.
|
| Anybody disagree? Reasons?
I disagree. I think I'm a "proper" Unix person, and I RTFM, but I
like .debs and the easy installation and upgrade mechanism that apt
provides. The nice part about packages are that you know they will
work and you only need to worry about the configuration. You know
that the files are all there, all library dependencies (including
versions) are met, and the docs are there too. It is unfortunate when
a program isn't packaged, or only has an old(er) version available,
but such is life. On one of my debian boxen I have exim 4 running.
(actually, it is nearly dead. I'm not sure what went wrong this time,
but it has so little memory that the kernel likes to kill things
sometimes) I just haven't gotten around to moving my other box to
exim 4. On the one hand, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Even
though v 4 isn't packaged yet, I'll likely move up to it in the next
few days anyways. It is really a pain when I must use a Solaris
system because I can never find any software on them (who knows where
the binaries were strewn, and 'find /' takes a long time) and it is a
royal pain to try and manage all the software I need to build myself
on them. It's almost as bad as Windows. (*almost*) Perhaps if I had
only one system to use and it was like that I could manage, but I use
5 or more different (unix) systems. (and a couple windows/cygwin here
and there, when I can't avoid it) The best deal is when I can simply
'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' to get the latest stuff
(dependencies included), and just keep the configs themselves in sync.
Usually when I wait for an already released new version of something
it is because either I surely can't create as nice a build as the
packager, or because I know the package will be here shortly, so why
waste my effort building it when I don't need to? Other times, such
as the vim alphas and betas and with exim 4, I just go ahead and build
it myself anyways. Eventually the packages will catch up and my
system will be nicely synchronized again, but with the new software.
-D
--
Misfortune pursues the sinner,
but prosperity is the reward for the righteous.
Proverbs 13:21
