[plug] boot into shell

[Craig Ringer]

On Sun, 2005-07-17 at 21:48 +0800, Quintin Lette wrote:
> On 7/17/05, Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au> wrote:

> > It's a pretty bad solution, really, in that you can't really help folks
> > out who use other distros, nor easily use them yourself if you need to.
> > 
> > Moreover, it's a total non-solution for developers.
> 
> The real trick is to live with the differences.

As a user, I tend to reluctantly agree. I use different distros for
different things, and find that to be the best option.

However, when doign development work it becomes apparent just how much
of that "live with the differences" is achieved through great amounts of
pain and autotools hacks, especially for GUI apps. Inconsistent
locations, different patches, different compile options, heck it's hard
enough to even reliably detect what distro you're on if you need to!

Package management issues really aren't that bad compared to some of the
other things you'll run into IMO. I've run into a couple of minor
distros that needed more work to support than Solaris 10 did.

> Yeah, sometimes its a pain to remember how to do something on a specific distro.
> (package management is a good example, I use 4 different package
> management systems on a regular basis due to no consistency between
> distros, and other *nixes, Yast for Suse, pkgadd for Solaris, apt-get
> for Debian and yum for Fedora) but you can't expect everything to be
> the same for every distro, each have their own advantages,
> disadvantages and quirks, you just have to work out what you are
> comfortable with and put up with it :)

Actually, increasingly, I can and do expect it. I'm all for
specialization and customisation where it actually achieves something,
but there are some things where once they're well established, the right
answer is to work together on a single superior system and stop wasting
time and effort. I think urpmi/yum etc fall firmly in that catagory.

Even little things, like how Qt is packaged, vary amazingly from distro
to distro. The number of places you have to look for Qt, and in what
different directory structures, is bizarre. On AMD64 it's even worse: do
you think Qt would live in:

/usr/lib/qt-3.3/lib64
/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib64
/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib
/usr/lib/qt-3.3/lib
/usr/lib64
/usr/lib

or somewhere even weirder? *argh*. What does this achieve but wasted
time and frustration?

As you may have guessed by now, I'm a FreeDesktop.org fan (mostly).

> I find I need different *nixes for different tasks so I have to do
> remember how things are done on each, but I don't see it as a negative
> point.

Really? I consider it stupid and time-wasting pain that's unavoidable
for historical reasons. I wish something better could be done with Linux
distros. 

Ever read the UNIX hater's handbook? It's so old it's amazing, and
you'll still recognise a good 1/2 of the really amazingly stupid
problems described therein.

--
Craig Ringer