"Rajiv Gunja" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Source based application or patch deployment is good only for > individual desktops and that too developer desktops, who know > what they are doing,
Thousands of FreeBSD server admins would strongly disagree agree with this. I know I spend far less time keeping BSD ports up to date than with binary RPMs. But please do explain, Rajiv, what your experience with BSD ports is and why you believe they require more technical knowledge than binary RPMs. > when they need some library which is missing Dependency resolution is identical between source and binary distributions. The advantage to source-based systems is that end-users can choose, for example, whether they want to compile SASL/TLS/LDAP dependencies with their MTA. They do not have to choose to compile in- or out- anything though. > Even though I am not a programmer, I have created packages based > on SVR (sun) and RPM (redhat). They are not that tough. Disagree again. I maintain RPMs too <http://www.postconf.com/software/> and the amount of time it takes to build every architecture for every release is several orders of magnitude greater than for simply tweaking a line or two in a makefile. > pkg-get comes very close to apt-get (debian) or yum (centos). > Yum is very well integrated into the OS, that you need not use > up2date to actually install or update the OS. But pkg-get is not > supported by SUN and does not update the "contents" database so > pkginfo or pkgrm does not know about these packages. Whether pkg, apt, yum is not at issue. If OpenSolaris adopts any of these models it will not win them a fraction of a percent of Linux or Unix mindshare. OTOH, if they adopt the BSD port model it will immediately translate into a large market share of Unix, and eventually into a large market share of Linux admins as well. > (I have updated 20 Production Linux servers in 1 night (1 hour), > compared to 2 hours of patch installs and reboots on a SUN > server, of course not counting the minutes spent in downloading > the tailored patch bundle (TLP). Well, having maintained thousands of Sun and hundreds of BSD and Linux servers I would guess that you haven't tried the ports model. BTW, it is not exclusive. There's nothing in the BSD port system that requires compilation. It works with binaries as well, but the advantages to install-time compilation are numerous and well documented. -- Roger Marquis Roble Systems Consulting http://www.roble.com/ _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
