[Kde-nonlinux] Pooched

[Jim Durham]

On Saturday 16 March 2002 12:11 pm, Lauri Watts wrote:
> On Saturday 16 March 2002 05.24, Mike Warner wrote:
> > > Some of my KDE is pooched.
> > > I installed from the 4.5 iso.  Most of KDE was not there so I
> > > installed what was missing from /stand/sysinstall using my 4.4
> > > iso disk.  It seemed to work.
> >
> > Call me paleolithic, but I just don't like package managers--any
> > package managers (rpm,pkg_add,debian, etc) for installing complex
> > subsystems like KDE. My recommendation is to bite the bullet and
> > get some experience installing subsystems from source. Your
> > knowledge and self-esteem will thank you.
>
> I hope you don't take this reply as flamebait, it's not intended to
> be harsh.
>
> You know, some of us spend huge amounts of time building packages
> and ports for people to use.  I'm not calling you paleolithic, I
> just think you don't understand how the ports work.  They are a
> framework that allow you to build a locally optimised and locally
> compiled copy of things for yourself.  
(snip)
>
> Advising someone new to Unix, to install all from source, outside
> the ports tree, on FreeBSD is doing them a disservice and making it
> needlessly harder.
>
(snip)

I agree wholeheartedly. I have installed from source, ports and 
packages. My favorite method is  setting PACKAGESITE to the packages 
directory for your release on your favorite freebsd ftp server and 
typing 'pkg_add -r  xxxx' .It finds all the dependencies and just 
does its thing! Great. Ports is equally wonderful, but somewhat 
slower, as you pointed out. 

The package system is a *huge* selling point for FreeBSD as compared 
to some of the other Free *nixes out there. I have gotten some really 
positive comments from customers for whom I'm installing their first 
FreeBSD server when they ask for something like an editor that isn't 
part of the base installation, and I just do a remote package add and 
it's there in sometimes seconds! With some of the others, you are 
chasing dependencies all over the 'net. I think the team needs some 
real congrats on that one!

I'd also like to ask, since you mentioned the KDE 3.0 package, is 
this now mature enough for general useage and does it fix some of the 
more frustrating problems with KDE 2 like the javascript and java 
problems in Konqueror? I've been sort of hanging back on installing 
it.

-jim