Re: Best Linux distro for GNUstep?

[Csanyi Pal]

Martin Dietze <di@fh-wedel.de> writes:

> 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 approach on Linux we're stuck on either running outdated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

I'm a Debian user too since 6 years.
I agree with everything abowe.

For me the only solution is to use FreeBSD because I want develope using
GNUstep, however I wish that that Debian change somehow so one can use
GNUstep and Étoilé on Debian with recent software.

-- 
Regards, Paul
<http://csanyi-pal.info>