Hi Charles.
Could you give us more information about some of the problems you've encountered? You wrote: > In linux I download the source, > fight for hours with Makefiles and header files - or if I'm lucky > ./configure will show me all the problems I need to fix in advance. OK, I > can install .deb files (or .rpm files or whatever) instead but then I have > to hope the package maintainer has kept everything up-to-date and hasn't > mucked up - the number of times gzip complains about not being able to > uncompress .deb files is amazing - and then I find someone's mucked up the > dependencies and have to spend ages mucking around on ftp.debian.org (or > mirrors) looking for stable-ish versions that will work and let me get on > with it. These are serious problems (i remember them well, from back before i adopted a Linux distribution), and Debian tries to provide a solution in the form of the dpkg/apt/dselect programs. I'm not sure from reading this whether you tried the Debian approach and still encountered problems, or whether you haven't tried the Debian approach yet. So i have a Debian system running here (it's my primary system), and when i need a new package.. for example, let's say i want to install the documentation-management package called "doc++" (which i recently installed. I strongly recommend this package to all C/C++ coders, by the way!)... So i just type "apt-get update", then wait for a few minutes, then type "apt-get install doc++". This handles all the problems of compilation, and dependencies (in the case of doc++, it will make sure you have a sufficiently modern version of the standard C++ library installed). I have very rarely encountered problems in the Debian packaging, and if i wanted to avoid such problems i could just run the stable branch of Debian instead. (But i like finding these problems so i can report them, which is one of the reasons that i run the unstable branch.) If this system isn't working for you for some reason, i'm sure we'd like to hear why not so that we can improve it. Regards, Zooko http://www.xs4all.nl/~zooko
