DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday 09 January 2011 04:00:21 Christopher Nicholson-Sauls wrote:
> On 01/08/11 20:18, Walter Bright wrote:
> > Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> >> On Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:34:19 +0200, Walter Bright
> >> 
> >> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> >>> Yeah, I could spend an afternoon doing that.
> >> 
> >> sudo apt-get build-dep meld
> >> wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/meld/1.5/meld-1.5.0.tar.bz2
> >> tar jxf meld-1.5.0.tar.bz2
> >> cd meld-1.5.0
> >> make
> >> sudo make install
> >> 
> >> You're welcome ;)
> > 
> > Thanks, I'll give it a try!
> 
> I say you should consider moving away from *Ubuntu and to something more
> "developer-friendly" such as Gentoo, where the command to install meld
> is just:
> emerge meld
> 
> ...done.  And yes, that's an install from source.  I just did it myself,
> and it took right at one minute.

Yeah well, much as I like gentoo, if he didn't like dealing with the pain of an 
Ubuntu upgrade messing with his machine, I doubt that he'll be enamoured with 
having to keep figuring out how to fix his machine because one of the builds 
didn't work on an update in Gentoo. Gentoo definitely has some great stuff going 
for it, but you have to be willing to deal with fixing your machine on a semi-
regular basis. Personally, I got sick of it and moved on. Currently, I use Arch, 
which is _way_ more friendly for building non-repo packages yourself or 
otherwise messing repo packages. You _can_ choose to build from source but don't 
_have_ to, and you get a rolling release like you effectively get with Gentoo. 
So, I'm much happier with Arch than I was with Gentoo.

But regardless, there's no need to start an argument over distros. They all have 
their pros and cons, and everyone is going to prefer one over another. Still, 
Gentoo is one of those distros where you have to expect to work at maintaining 
your machine, whereas Ubuntu really isn't. So, I wouldn't normally recommend 
Gentoo to someone who's using Ubuntu unless they're specifically looking for 
something like Gentoo.

- Jonathan M Davis