Re: Best Linux distro for GNUstep?

[Martin Dietze]

On Thu, March 24, 2011, Ivan Vučica wrote:

> From my experience as a multiyear Debian user, with Debian, packages are
> also released as soon as they are ready. Person switches to "unstable"
> and that's it. One can also use "experimental" for individual bleeding
> edge packages. But, "unstable" is just that -- unstable.

I, like many other Debian users, usually run on 'testing'.
The package policy is still pretty conservative, i.e. there's
hardly any bleeding-edge stuff. Now I can install some
particular packages from 'unstable', selectively. This often
does not work since they may depend on other stuff which is not
available on 'testing' (there were times when some of the base
libraries were available in incompatible versions on 'testing'
and 'unstable'). Also sometimes packager change some of the
structure from 'unstable' to 'testing', i.e. a library package
is split into several smaller ones etc. This makes running a
large set of libraries and applications like the GS suite
installed from 'unstable' on a 'testing' system unfeasable. Even
if it works, you need quite a bit of expertise to install it.

Thus I see no alternative to providing packages for the
different distros on a central repository. With the current
approach on Linux we're stuck on either running outdated
versions provided by our distros or compiling GS and all that
depends on it by hand. After having done the second for years
and having invested far too much time in updating sources,
compiling them, finding things not working etc., I've switched
back to the first approach which means no GS playtime for me. 

Projects like Etoile introduce some quite attractive stuff based
on GS. But since it usually depends on the very latest GS
library code and for the reasons I described above it is de
facto not available to 95% of all Linux users. Even if only a
smaller part is 'desktop-ready' this means that GS as a platform
gets far less attention than it deserves.

Cheers,

M'bert

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