Brian Dean wrote:
On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 04:09:59PM +0200, David Brown wrote:
Perhaps because it's easier to download winavr than get avr-gcc working
on FreeBSD?
Surely you're joking Mr. Brown?
What could be easier than 'cd /usr/ports/devel/avr-libc && make install'?
I started my next paragraph with "More seriously..." - I realise that
avr-gcc is straightforward to install on FreeBSD (baring the kind of
minor slip that can occur with any system). My comments were a more
general one about software installation on different systems.
As Joerg mentioned, the doc breakage was merely temporary.
Secondly, although decent Linux distros (and FreeBSD) make it
extremely easy to get hold of and install a wide range of software,
this only applies to "standard" software for which someone is acting
as a maintainer. When you want to install or upgrade any of the
tens of thousands of packages in the Debian archives, it is vastly
easier than in the Windows world. But when you step outside of
that, you enter the world of dependency resolution, patching,
./configure, and make, instead of an InstallShield wizard.
I disagree with your assertion because you generally only need to step
outside of the port/rpm maintainer world when you need to do something
very special to your situation. The InstallShield world never even
gives you the opportunity to do that, so of course you can't get
yourself into trouble. But by the other edge of the sword, you do not
have the flexibility to handle the special situation should you need
to.
As to the other edge of the sword, then I agree absolutely - when you
want to do something special, there is no doubt that it is much easier
when you are working with *nix (cygwin and/or mingw will get you part of
the way there on windows). Even for open source programs, it is
frequently difficult to modify and compile the software on windows, as
the software may require specific compilers.
But I don't agree that you need to do something "very special" to step
outside the realms of your distribution's list of packages. I use
Debian on servers and Kubuntu on a laptop, and I gather that FreeBSD's
ports repository has a similar range of packages. I have found a number
of occasions when I have installed software that is outside these ranges
(sometimes this is because I want newer versions of some software
without updating the whole system - this has become less of an issue for
my servers now that I use virtual servers for specific tasks).
Sometimes I have been able to find packages from third-party
repositories, and sometimes I have compiled from source. The
flexibility to handle this is part of what makes open source such a
powerful development model - but the *need* to do that is something that
hinders the use of *nix in some situations.
Also, don't forget that you're somewhat spoiled by using FreeBSD - think
about the poor folks running Mandrivia, Fedora, Mephis, or any one of
the dozens of other popular Linux distributions with much smaller
package repositories. Who will make an avr-gcc package for them? A
single package format that works on a wide range of *nix's (or
alternatively, a utility that automatically builds the required range of
package formats) would mean that avr-gcc would be as easy to install on
*any* *nix system as it is on any windows system.
mvh.,
David
For example, Joerg recently sent me some patches for flex and byacc
that do something very specific that I'm interested in. I can just
download the source, apply the patches, build it and have fun. What
would I do if I lived in the InstallShield universe?
I use both FreeBSD and MacOS X. The FreeBSD ports system is top shelf
stuff, IMO. MacOS X has a system called MacPorts, formerly called
DarwinPorts. This is also a very nice system which is roughly
equivalent to a somewhat refined FreeBSD ports. I always use the
"ports" unless I need to do something special like the patches from
Joerg above. It's a rare case that I need to go outside the usual
ports systems but having that capability, to me, is essential to my
being. :-)
Cheers,
-Brian
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