A picture for users of lesser OSs

Re:A picture for users of lesser OSs by ErrantX on Thursday October 08, 2009 @09:56AM (#868973)

Repositories are a wonderful sexy and brilliant thing with lots going for them. But I always like to counter effusive praise like that with some caveats. Like that they do have flaws; often dependencies aren't worked out correctly, many of the interfaces are a little confusing/inaccessible for a noob, the ratio of signal/noise in terms of quality software is sometimes annoyingly low, I've yet to see a really good GUI search interface for one, often you get an older version of the software.

And so forth.

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Re:A picture for users of lesser OSs by div on Thursday October 08, 2009 @10:02AM (#868986)

Or you get a hacked up version that does not behave as you'd expect it to. E.g.: if you install gems using apt on ubuntu or debian, you'll get a modified version that tries to install rubygems from one of their own repositories. Also, it wasn't correctly symlinking gems after i'd install them either.

Apart from that though, yeah, repositories are pretty sexy indeed.

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Re:A picture for users of lesser OSs by lil_cain on Thursday October 08, 2009 @11:27AM (#869165)

I've never even thought of installing more than one package manager. I package CPAN modules when I need them. If I needed gems, I'd probably do the same thing.

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Re:A picture for users of lesser OSs by rbanffy on Thursday October 08, 2009 @10:05AM (#868996)

I am always weary of installing gems (actually, I use mostly Python, so I install eggs). It seems wrong to go against APT.

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Re:A picture for users of lesser OSs by div on Friday October 09, 2009 @03:15AM (#870785)

I can understand that, but it's easy enough to specify the apt repository as a parameter to the gems command. If you really want it as the default, it's trivial to alias that. There's something to be said for just letting your packages have the default behaviour.

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