installfest distros

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/8/05, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 05:44:20PM -0400, Steve A wrote:
> > On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 05:29:12PM -0400 or thereabouts, William Park wrote:
> >
> > > Agree with Allen, and disagree with Steve.  Slackware is the easiest
> > > one to install, because usually you install everything from the CD
> > > to harddisk (3GB).  Slackware has no concept of "workstation",
> > > "desktop", "server", or "expert" themes, which, quite honestly, I
> > > don't fully understand why Debian, Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSe
> > > continue to perpetrate.
> >
> > It's a good distro, just not a good first choice for beginners,
> > neither is vanilla Debian IMHO.
> >
> > Does Slackware have a package manager that can compare to either
> > Debians or SuSE's ? I think not, and that is an important
> > consideration -- don't forget we're talking for the most part about
> > NOVICE users. Last time I used Slack, one basically had to compile by
> > hand and look after one's own dependencies...
> >
> > Have things changed in this regard with Slackware ?
> 
> Slackware has package manager; it's called 'tar'.  You can upgrade
> "live" in Slackware, just like any other distro.

Then the *straight* answer is, no, it has not changed.  

As far as I can see, Slackware still lacks the ability for the
packaging system to recursively track dependancies and to permit
automated incremental upgrades.

Tar is NOT a package manager; it is a Tape Archiving program; if
that's the only alternative you can point to as alternative to
apt-get/yast/urpmi, it is a sad thing.

The BSD guys transmit packages as tarballs, but structure the sources
using Ports.  It's "merely" a cluster of Makefiles, but it's not so
primitive that they could say "oh, just download a tarball and run
make."
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