Re: [PLUG] General Debian Question

[Fred K Ollinger <follinge@sas.upenn.edu>]

> Hi all. I'de like get a little feedback on Debian
> since I know we have some users on the list. I've been
> using Gentoo alot lately and I really like it...
> particularly the portage system of package
> maintenance. The only thing I don't like is compiling
> everything. I've picked around with debian before but
> always got frustrated for one reason or another. My
> question is... are there reliable apt sources that
> have recently updated software? I was looking around

Yes. It is called sid. It's been there for years. If you upgrade to sid
daily, you will have the most recent software of any distro.

There are also debian packages for nearly everything. I can think of very
little (parrot) that I can't find as a debian package.

If the packages are not in sid, then there are alt sources everywhere.

Try www.debianplanet.net for a start.

If it's not there, then post to plug.

My dreams of becoming a package maintainer has been thwarted many times by
someone beating me to the punch.

I even found apt sources for acroread, pine, openoffice, and the
R-project.

> all the debian repositories and I don't see KDE 3 (for
> example) in woody, sid, or sarge. Are there no KDE 3
> packages yet for Debian? Is there a good source that
> usually has all the latest and greates packages
> available? Any feedback would be great. Thanks!!

The problem is that these packages need to be tested w/ one another.

There are issues w/ maintainers as this is a volunteer project. Also,
debian spends time trying to support a bunch of arches.

If one wants the latest sw that's been beta tested by people all together
then you might stick w/ mandrake.

But mandrake is going to be stale the second it hits the shelves. And it's
not going to have as many packages as debian does in its unofficial
repositories.

Really, debian makes you decide what you really want. If you want the
absolute latest then you are going to be a beta tester. If you want rock
solid stable then you are going to be behind the times. If you want
in-between then you are going to be a sarge user.

If you don't mind compiling your own packages then there's infrastructure
to do so in debian (as there is in the rpm-based distros).

KDE3 has been releaed for debian. Here's a story:

http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=778

Fred



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