Re: Best Linux distro for GNUstep?

[Martin Dietze]

On Thu, March 24, 2011, David Chisnall wrote:

> If you want decent packages, skip Linux and use FreeBSD - ports show up
> a few days after each release and then it's just a matter of 'portinstall
> gnustep' to get all of the dependencies and everything installed.  Oh,
> and you also get some nice bonuses like ZFS and sound that works without
> buggy userspace sound daemons.

Now there's always a bit of a conflict between having the most
recent GS code *OR* having a distro on which every GS-based
application will always work. 

While using quite a few GS apps on my desktop installing a new
GS version from the sources can mean having to recompile those
apps, too. Using the apps from my distro does not really help
because I can't be sure that my self-compiled bleeding-edge GS
coexists with my distro's one.

This is why I've surrendered and am now just using my distro's
(old) GS packages - which basically means *NO* Etoile stuff. 

So what would be really useful for proper distro integration
would be not only providing packages of the GS libraries but
also the whole suite of GS-based applications built against the
most recent version of the libraries. Coming from the Debian
world I'd see this kind of approach as an "experimental" and
unofficial apt repository.

I don't know how the *BSD-guys do it, if 'portinstall gnustep'
does all the stuff I'm talking about then this looks fairly
attractive and probably means that they've got small upgrade
cycles for packages and also an enthusiastic package maintainer
who even has an eye at all the applications out there. 

However for most distros this is not the case. And given the
fact that there are rather frequent changes in the GS libraries
ordinary distro users will only see the older GS-apps for a long
time until sometime in the future there is a major release of
the Etoile code.

Cheers,

M'bert

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