Questions about windows support

[James Miller]

On 21 February 2012 15:06, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>
> Yeah, Unixland really works best with the "here's the source code,
> compile it yourself" model, rather than with the Windows "here's the
> binary executable" model. Gentoo's emerge is a step closer to making it
> more accessible to end-users (i.e. non-programmers who don't know what
> "compile" means), but still, compiling source code isn't always an
> option.

As a former Gentoo user, emerge is not user friendly (but neither is
the OS in general), I get your point however.

Arch Linux does well with the Arch Build System. pacman (the package
manager) just installs the software the way the package tells it to,
it has built-in support for remote repositories, but you can also just
install local packages. This means that a system like the Arch User
Repository works, since not everything in the official repos is
update, and not everything is even /in/ the repos, I can normally go
to the AUR, download a PKGBUILD archive, extract it, use makepkg to
download+build it, then use pacman to install it. Not the simplest
workflow in the world, but there are utilities like yaourt to make it
easier (basically pacman for AUR).

--
James Miller