The DUB package manager

[Moritz Maxeiner]

On Tuesday, 19 February 2013 at 00:53:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> Admittedly, most of my linux experience (an unix in general) is
> Debian-derived stuff. (And a little bit of Mandrake from way 
> back when
> it was still called Mandrake, but that's not exactly relevant
> experience anymore ;) )

I was hooked on Ubuntu myself, until they began getting all
"MUST_CLONE_MACOSX", "MUST_TAKE_CONTROL_AWAY_FROM_USER" on 
everyone's ass (around the versions 8/9, I think). Tried a lot of 
different distros, eventually
landed with Arch. I think it's just the right mixture of 
convenience and customizability.

> Although I'll probably wait until the
> rumblings I've heard about efforts to make it easier to set up 
> start
> bearing fruit - I've been pretty much scarred for life on any 
> sort of
> manual configuring of X11. ;)

I'll treat that as two seperate points :)
(1) Setup Arch from install medium to first login:
That is unpleasant work, sadly. There once was something called 
AIF (Arch installation framework), which was an ncurses-graphical 
installer; it was good, but old and iirc barely maintained. 
Eventually they devs apparently decided to drop it and only ship 
a couple of scripts, that were easier to maintain and as far as I 
know they have not made any plans public where they would do more 
than provide these scripts. Point being, don't expect this part 
to get easier any time soon, it probably won't, so I'd suggest 
not tying the trying Archlinux out part to that problem.
On the other hand the Archlinux wiki (wiki.archlinux.org) has an 
excellent Beginner's guide and said scripts are fairly easy to 
use and remember, so after the second time you can usually do an 
Arch installation faster than the auto-installer of other distros 
(only possible because the Arch base system so very small, of 
course).

(2) X11 setup: Why would you want to configure X11 manually? 
"sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xf86-input-evdev 
xorg-video-(ati/intel/nouveau)", then install your desktop 
environment, e.g. "sudo pacman -S enlightenment17", copy the 
skeleton xinitrc file "cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~/" and change the 
exec line to your desktop environment, e.g. "exec 
enlightenment_start". Done. Now "startx" will give you your fully 
functional desktop environment, no need for any xorg.confs, X11 
configures itself automatically. Usually the only reason for an 
xorg.conf is when using the proprietary nvidia/ati drivers, but 
the Arch wiki has lenghtly (well-written) articles regarding 
those.

>
> In any case though, there still remains the problem that 
> OS-level
> package managers are more or less OS-specific. Something like 
> 0install
> sounds great, although I admit that I've been aware of it for 
> years
> and still have yet to actually try it.

I'm not familiar with 0install myself and the truth is I probably 
never will look at it - unless it can integrate with pacman, that 
is - I've simply grown to dependent on the convenience of pacman 
to try anything else :)
Anyway, I didn't want to put more oil in the fire of the 
OS-specific-language-independent-package-manager vs. 
language-specific-OS-independent-package manager debate (because 
frankly, I can't contribute much in that area, all I want is a 
package manager that simply works, be it OS or language specific, 
I really don't care as long as it just gets the job done right - 
one of the reasons I'm happy with pacman btw.), I just wanted to 
point out that not all OS-package-managers are evil. Sorry for 
dragging you slightly off-topic for so long^^