thelinuxlink.net

As much as I love Linux, there is one thing that has always been a thorn in my side; getting software installed that isn't available in the distro's official repositories, or getting brand new versions of applications installed. This issue is particularly irritating me right now on Debian 4.0, in which I want to upgrade from an old beta version of Gaim, to the newly released "Pidgin". Well, after spending hours trying to get the source to compile, and then running into dependency errors, I finally gave up. I'm sitting here on this great OS, which is very secure and stable, and yet, I can't even try a new piece of software without upgrading core parts of my operating system, and satisfying my package manager. It's times like this that I envy software installation on Windows and OS X machines. I'm also really missing the relaxed, minimal package system on Slackware. Atleast on Slackware, it's usually trivial to grab the latest source code, roll your own packages, and avoid many dependency issues altogether.

What to do, what to do...

I had a look on some distros to see where its available . gentoo, arch,frugalware, fedora and kateos have it.

FreeBSD is close to having it, is has pidgin 2.0.0.b7

In the linux(maybe any unices?) world there is autopackage, which is suppose to be a package that can be installed on any linux distro, very few projects use it though.

can't even try a new piece of software without upgrading core parts of my operating system, and satisfying my package manager.

That's where FreeBSD ports comes in, you can install any base release and run the latest packages.

Gentoo's portage has had a pidgin 2.0 ebuild since May 4th. The main reason I run a Gentoo based distro is because of how uptodate the packages are and how large it's selection. I can almost always find a peice of software and if not I can simple get it from an overlay or the bugzilla.

CptnObvious999 wrote:Gentoo's portage has had a pidgin 2.0 ebuild since May 4th. The main reason I run a Gentoo based distro is because of how uptodate the packages are and how large it's selection. I can almost always find a peice of software and if not I can simple get it from an overlay or the bugzilla.

If you got the time and patience and perseverance when ebuilds fsck up

allix wrote:

CptnObvious999 wrote:Gentoo's portage has had a pidgin 2.0 ebuild since May 4th. The main reason I run a Gentoo based distro is because of how uptodate the packages are and how large it's selection. I can almost always find a peice of software and if not I can simple get it from an overlay or the bugzilla.

If you got the time and patience and perseverance when ebuilds fsck up

Since December that has happened maybe a couple times at most to me. And when it does it is usually an easy fix.

i found this article that has some good points

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog ... l#comments

A couple of asides:

FreeBSD's ports are frozen while they merge xorg 7.2, so once it unlocks, I would imagine pidgin 2.0 final will be in there. I have FreeBSD running on a couple of boxes and the ports maintainers sure are quick to add in the latest stuff. And everything seems to work extremely well.

There is a Slackware package at linuxpackages.net

There is work on a Slackbuild at slackbuilds.org. There are issues with linking to the mozilla-nss package, but once that sorts out, it should be trivial to install from the slackbuild.

But back to the main point, I agree with you Wally. I am also running Debian Etch and loving it, but adding the latest and greatest isn't always easy on Debian stable releases.

allix wrote:i found this article that has some good points

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog ... l#comments

I'm afraid I have to agree with the naysayers in that article. While I certainly know how to compile (though I couldn't have answered either of his example questions w/o man pages and google access) it doesn't work well to have some compiled and some non-compiled packages on stable systems you need support for. One of my major gripes with red hat is their absolutely minuscule repos - it appears they don't even have mod_secure in their repos, for instance. This means I have to do a lot of stuff by hand. This is fine if it's something that's more or less self contained, like clamav or zlib, but if it's a major piece of code, forget it.

As easy as it is to ./configure && make && make install on a single home box, it is an absolute nightmare to do this on a wide scale. Not the install, mind you, but the maintenance it requires afterwards. Hell, even my earlier example of clamav is a pain in the ass. I have had to manually upgrade it 4 times since the beginning of the year on about 8 boxes, and for some unknowable reason the devs have seen fit to start dicking with the config files (adding booleans where there were none before), and adding/removing options from their milter. Blowing up mail servers because compiles create issues, even if the compile went 100% ok, makes you look like an asshat, not like a compiler hero.

I agree with Snarkout. That and I'm just getting too lazy to bother with keeping track of the programs I've installed myself on my own desktop. I really don't care about bleeding edge stuff anymore, and just stick to the official repos as much as I can, even if that means being a little behind the times. It's rare that there's a "gotta-have" feature in a program that makes me think I can't wait a few months for it to be packaged.

Gentoo was nice about giving you the latest, but I just became tired of upgrading the ridiculous number of packages I had installed, partly because portage worked a little too well, I suppose. The occasional breakage was usually very minor, but Ubuntu and the Update Notifier take so little time, I don't really have a reason to switch.

Perhaps autopackage will take off one day, in the meantime I'll just take my time and upgrade every six months with Ubuntu, though I haven't even bothered to upgrade to Feisty, yet.

When it comes to tracking software compiled from source, checkinstall does a fine job of that. When I was running Slackware on several boxes, I simply compiled on one machine, and then scp'ed the tarballs onto my other boxes and then installed them using pkgtool.

I don't really understand what the problem is. I've found that judicious use of ./configure options is all that's needed to compile unusual/bleeding-edge software.

Right now I have 12 different versions of SBCL (a lisp compiler), Ruby 1.8.2 through 1.8.6, and countless many Ruby of Rails installed in different directories in my ~/local. When I need to upgrade I'll just create a new directory.

I guess not all of us are as hardcore geekified as you are.

To get back to your original post, why are you using debian if you want the latest packages?
And why do you praise slackware and not use it?

And another question, what's with the linux bitching ?

How much does Steve jobs pay you ?

Just to point out, Pidgin 2.0.0 is also in Zenwalk's "testing" repository.

Update:

Oh, Mandriva Cooker has it, as well.

allix wrote:To get back to your original post, why are you using debian if you want the latest packages?

I'm using Debian right now because Etch just came out, and I like the stability it offers. To me, it seems like the whole Linux packaging system is fundamentally broken if I have to run a bleeding edge operating system just to have a few up-to-date userland applications. Why can't debian stable function like Windows or Mac OS X, so that the core OS is separate from the applications?

And why do you praise slackware and not use it?

I do like Slackware, and I'll probably install it again when 11.1 comes out, but it's not without it's flaws. I do appreciate a robust package management system like Apt, but again, Apt isn't without it's flaws either. Nothing is perfect.