On Dec 31, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Gerry Lawrence wrote:
Top posting, as it's the new year.
I gotta agree with this. Freebsd's package manager and openbsd's
package management are both superior in
execution and design. Compared to any of the linux tools, including
RPM, apt-get, or Gentoo's, it's not even close.
Don't get me wrong, I love the little linuxes, but It's not even
close.
BSD's just do the right thing and work.
RPM? You gotta be freaking kidding me. apt-get? Much improved of
late, but still broken by design. Gentoo - sigh.
Gentoo will work on single machines, with a dedicated religious
fanatic
attending to it, but try to scale it and you get all sorts of
sillyness.
(recently witnessed this first hand, it was not pretty).
I've always wondered about this; there must be some sort of "thinks-
like-bsd" gene, afaict, because you either love it or hate it.
In my experience, it's nearly impossible to write software that
manages *bsd packages; I've got support for 25 or so package types in
Puppet, and the ports support is the only one that I can't get to work
correctly, nor has anyone else who's tried. I think the current
problem is that it will try to upgrade when it shouldn't but I don't
really remember any more. I just know that I've wasted weeks of my
life trying to get consistent, desired behaviour from ports, and I
couldn't do it.[1] The specific problem I remember was never being
able to get it to ignore the source ports tree when checking for a new
compiled package -- it would always show a new version, because the
compiled packages are always behind the source packages.
I'll take crappy but consistent behaviour over awesome but seemingly
random behaviour any day of the week, because I can code around the
crappiness but I can't code around randomness.
So, hateful depends on context, and for me, if I can't wrap your
software in my own software, it's hateful.
1 - If you're convinced I'm just stupid and that it's wicked-easy to
get consistent behaviour, I challenge you to do so. You would make
*many* bsd Puppet users happy.
--
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above
principles. -- George Jean Nathan
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
