Package management

[Donald Allen]

On 7/22/06, Tom Purl <tom at tompurl.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 02:36:36AM +0000, Donald Allen wrote:
> > I'd like to gently suggest to the many people who have written to this
> forum
> > describing various forms of dependency hell they've gotten themselves
> into
> > that there are modern package management systems offered by Debian,
> Ubuntu,
> > Gentoo, and, reputedly, Redhat (I have no experience with yum, but I'm
> told
> > it's a huge improvement over trying to maintain a Redhat system at the
> rpm
> > level). It's just not necessary to get yourself into this kind of
> trouble.
> > Yes, instant gratification can be the motivation, as the latest gnucash
> > isn't immediately made available by many distributions (I once built
> gnucash
> > manually from source on a Debian system for this reason -- it took me
> the
> > better part of a day to get it right; never again!). But this is not a
> > problem with a distribution such as Gentoo, which makes new versions
> > available quickly, albeit in the 'testing' state.
> >
>
> I would have to agree with this statement.  I use Ubuntu, and while
> it took me a few hours to properly compile GnuCash from source, I
> appear to have had significantly fewer problems than a lot of
> RedHat/CentOS users who have posted to this list.  I honestly can't
> imagine having to install a complex program like GnuCash by scouring
> a bunch RPM sites and hoping that all of the RPM's will all play
> well together.


I have three laptops running Gentoo, all set up identically (I have
different uses for each and keep them rsync'ed). One is a test system for
evaluating things like gnucash 2.0. I made a one-line change to a
package-system (portage) configuration file (necessary only because v2.0 is
still in Gentoo's  'testing' state), typed a simple command ('emerge
gnucash') and walked away. When I came back later, I had a working version
of gnucash 2.0, built from source, all dependencies attended to (I can't
praise Gentoo highly enough; it's one of the best bits of software work I've
ever seen in my long computing career; and I would say the same for
Gnucash).

I haven't used it a whole lot yet, but 2.0 looks very nice thus far. The
developers are to be congratulated and thanked for providing this marvelous
program to the open-source community.

/Don Allen