[kwlug-disc] What's the best desktop distribution?

[Lori Paniak]

On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 16:21 -0500, Chris Frey wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 01:04:32PM -0500, Paul Nijjar wrote:
> > At some point a Gentoo advocate will speak up and tell me why the
> > underlying problem lies in binary package formats. I can believe it,
> > but I am not sure that Gentoo is the right answer either. 
> 
> I'm not current with the latest Gentoo innovations, but the only
> "advantage" that I've seen in Gentoo is that when you install a package
> you generally get everything: headers, libraries, utilities, etc.
> If you want to turn something off, you have to state it explicitly.
> 
> While in the Debian binary package world, they split the headers,
> libraries, documentation, utilities, etc. into binary packages of
> their own that have a web of dependencies.  If you *want* something,
> you have to state it explicitly.
> 
> I don't think either really solves the problem you're asking for.
> Except that it is slightly more natural in Gentoo to create an ebuild
> that downloads from CVS automatically and installs.  But I'm sure that's
> possible in Debian too, with some creativity.
> 
> - Chris
> 

As Chris said earlier, packaging is like accounting.  It is 10-parts
tedious detail and 0-parts creativity.  Perfect job for a computer.  I'm
not a programmer but I have managed to cobble together some functional
deb packages.  If I can do it, then writing a script to grab source and
arrange it into a .deb should be quite do-able.  In fact, I'd be
surprised if there wasn't a system to do it out there already.
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