As to 'most stable' I've run into unresolvable and/or circular dependency problems with both rpm and dpkg (dpkg more) so frequently of late that I'm about to give up on that method. Nice idea, but 'works sometimes' isn't quite enough. I'm interested in finding out if ports does any better. But since Slackware doesn't attempt such feats it doesn't suffer such problems, so from that perspective it is more stable.
I use FreeBSD on two of my computers at home, my main workstation and my web/email server. I also use OpenBSD on my gateway/firewall. Ports do solve most dependency problems that you encounter with rpm and dpkg. Occasionally, I have run into a certain port, mysql++ comes to mind, that assumes you have a different version of a dependency installed, but in those cases, I've had an easy time modifying the Makefile to look for the other version of the package. (Usually that means checking for a different library or header version.) When I find these issues I send a patch to the port maintainer. Of course, that's not so easy for folks who aren't programmers.
You can also install pre-compiled packages of things that are available in ports. This works a lot like installing packages on Slack. (I ran Slackware for 4 years before switching to FreeBSD.) You'll occasionally run into problems with dependencies, and they're harder to fix in binary distributions than with ports, so I pretty much install everything from ports.
Rebuilding your system, by which I mean updating system source and application source and then recompiling it all from scratch, can take quite a long time. I often set aside a good part of a weekend for a complete source upgrade for my two machines. However, I do believe that the benefits are worth the trade off in time. I don't think that I'd switch my home machines back to a system that relied heavily on binary packages after using ports. It has become so much a habit of how I work.
Cheers, Jason _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
