> I have heard praises of Debian's install system but Debian is quite > conservative with latest versions. There are some packages (e.g. Python, > PostgreSQL, Subversion) where I'd like to have the latest versions. > I don't want to be too tightly bound to the update cycles of the > Linux distribution.
Then you can go for debian testing or (as I do) unstable. They usually have the latest stuff in, and for a desktop-system that doesn't need uptimes measured in years its really good. Occasionally, some dependency matters occur in these releases, and I have to force installation of packages. But usually, things are smooth, and apart from a hd-crash in January, I never had to reinstall my system for now 2-3 years. Before that, I used Suse, and switching between releases did give me quite a few headaches - usually I reinstalled the system, as my home was on its own partition. However, a warning has to be voiced: Commercial distributions do a better job on the hardware detection/integration side of linux-life. Debian can do what can be done on linux in general, but it might require some config-file-fiddling and the occasional kernel build. Still worth the effort for me, though. > If there would be a common specification how to query and change > configuration data of the system and applications this would be > really helpful. Yup. And above that, tool support for configure or the like that will integrate this - for example, on debian nearly all libs come with an extra dev-package you need when compiling against them. No big deal, but compiling software yourself usually means to downtrack these packages by making multiple configure runs, until all missing headerfiles are there. -- Regards, Diez B. Roggisch -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
