Re: Building 5.8.7 broke Open Office

(This is not meant to be snarky.)

I have always distrusted rpms and apt-get for precisely this reason. When I ran redhat, I never used the RPM system, preferring to always build from source, even if I took the standard install. The only pkg management system I've come to like is the BSD ports, because they build from source.

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Comment on Re: Building 5.8.7 broke Open Office

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Re^2: Building 5.8.7 broke Open Office by talexb (Chancellor) on Oct 20, 2005 at 12:29 UTC
I agree -- I've only used rpms for a little while -- it's some magic that I just don't get or trust, while building from source is solid. The problems arise when there are dependencies .. sure, I built Perl from source (it's not the first time) but it also affected the stability of this particular system. And it appears that I would have had that problem whether or not I could get the rpm to install correctly anyway. Oh well. And I didn't think your response was snarky. ;) Alex / talexb / Toronto "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds	[reply]

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Re^2: Building 5.8.7 broke Open Office
by talexb (Chancellor) on Oct 20, 2005 at 12:29 UTC

I agree -- I've only used rpms for a little while -- it's some magic that I just don't get or trust, while building from source is solid.

The problems arise when there are dependencies .. sure, I built Perl from source (it's not the first time) but it also affected the stability of this particular system. And it appears that I would have had that problem whether or not I could get the rpm to install correctly anyway. Oh well.

And I didn't think your response was snarky. ;)

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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