Re: Best Linux distro for GNUstep?

[David Chisnall]

On 24 Mar 2011, at 17:57, Ivan Vučica wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 18:42, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:
> On 24 Mar 2011, at 15:51, Martin Dietze wrote:
> 
>> FreeBSD lets you update third-party packages independently of the core OS.  
>> This seems much more sane than the approach of most Linux distributions, 
>> where they try to make third-party packages conform to the distribution's 
>> release cycle, but I suppose that's required since everything in a Linux 
>> distribution is a third-party package.
>> 
> I can install third-party .debs on Debian and Ubuntu whenever I want, and add 
> third party repositories. In fact, as you know, Debian has unstable and 
> testing, and even experimental. Dependency checks can cause issues, but so 
> they can on FreeBSD, right? 

You misunderstand.  When I say 'third-party packages' I mean 'software not 
written / maintained by the FreeBSD team'.  This means everything except the 
FreeBSD kernel, core useland apps, and a few things that are essential to a 
working system, which the FreeBSD team maintains forks of.  

In the Linux world, almost nothing is actually written by the distribution 
authors.  The kernel comes from Linux, the core userland comes from the GNU 
project, and so on.  In Debian, for example, there is no distinction between 
things like GIMP and thinks like the Linux kernel - they are both provided via 
the same mechanism.  In the BSD world, there is a core system and there are 
third-party packages.  You can update packages independently of the base 
system, and are encouraged to do so (except on OpenBSD).  This means that you 
can start using third-party things as soon as they are ready.

I think Fedora still has a similar model, where packages are made available as 
soon as they are ready upstream, but Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu) ships a 
huge raft of third-party programs as a single snapshot of the state of the 
software world, and you then use those versions until a new version of the core 
OS is released.  Of you install packages from a source other than the official 
repositories.

David