[PLUG] For The SysAdmin Gurus

[Wil Cooley]

On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 15:08 -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Aug 2006, Wil Cooley wrote:
> 
> > Now you understand the problems with using a distro that doesn't have
> > package management.
> 
>    Guess that's why I'm not a SysAdmin, Wil. 

How many years have you been denying that, Rich?  You've got to admit
that to yourself; you've been doing it for a long time now.  Admitting
it is the first step to alt.sysadmin.recovery :)

The difference is that you don't do it often enough to have gotten sick
of doing the manual stuff over and over again and realized that
sometimes you should trade off control for certain worries.  That
encapsulates my opinion of Slackware pretty well--but it's not just
Slackware, I used to worry and fiddle with an installation to keep the
size down as small as possible, to tweak and tune and fiddle bits here
and there.  Nowadays, I could mostly care less.  I'd rather work within
the constraints of the system and focus my time where I get either the
least work down with the most accomplishment, or the most fun.  I mean,
if doing stuff manually is your thing, and you've got the time, then by
all means, love yourself all over it.  But it doesn't sound like you do.

> When I go to the firefox web
> site it identifies my need as linux in English. I've never seen a package up
> there, not Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, or any other.
> It's a gzipped tar that needs no configuration, making, or installing other
> than untarring in the directory of our choice.

I've only ever downloaded Firefox from mozilla.org for Windows
installations; for Linux installations, I used the included binary (or
one from an established 3rd party), built for my particular system.  The
problem that people complain about with Linux systems is the diversity
of environments; with a huge application like Firefox that depends so
deeply on many parts of the system, it's particularly bad.

>    How would a package management distribution prevent this problem?

 o If you think you've missed uninstalling something, package management
would have let you know that you'd completely uninstalled it.

 o If you installed things with library version dependencies that got
mangled (which it sounds like it has), package management would have
made it harder for you to shoot yourself in that particular foot.

 o Most of the distros with package management would also have provided
you a binary, the right libraries, etc.

Wil
-- 
Wil Cooley <wcooley at nakedape.cc>
Naked Ape Consulting, Ltd
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