playing with ubuntu first time

Sat Feb 3 13:58:17 UTC 2007

On 2/2/07, Zbigniew Koziol <softquake-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Friday 02 February 2007 17:50, Tim Writer wrote:
> > Zbigniew Koziol <softquake-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes:
> > > When I do:
> > >
> > >     apt-get install texinfo
> > >
> > > I see that it attempts to do something with postfix (restart it and other
> > > things). That fails.
> > >
> > > Why postfix? What it has to do with postfix? Why restarting? Isn't that
> > > crazy?
> >
> > Is it possible that you have a version of postfix partially installed? When
> > installation of a package failed to complete properly (for whatever
> > reason), apt-get will try to remedy it whenever it's run. What does:
> >
> >     % dpkg -l postfix
>
> Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
> | Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
> |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err:
> uppercase=bad)
> ||/ Name                   Version                Description
> +++-======================-======================-============================================================
> iF  postfix                2.2.10-1ubuntu0.1      A high-performance mail
> transport agent
>
> > say? How about this?
> >
> >     % sudo apt-get -s -f install
>
> I do not want to ;)

Then why did you:

a) Choose a distribution which expects to do this sort of thing,
and, more importantly,
b) Let it leave a package-managed copy of postfix half-installed?

Installing something from source that the distribution will happily
manage for you is a *little* bit daft.

But having a package-managed copy of an app that you leave broken in
addition to one installed from sources is the *real* problem, "all the
way daft."

> > > The fact is that I have postfix installed (and running) but from source.
> >
> > Why from source? Except for "leaf" packages (on which nothing depends),
> > installing packages from source is often a source of trouble on any package
> > based Linux distro.
>
> Installing from source gives me more freedom. Isn't Linux about freedom?
> That's why I use it. I want to have a possibility to test various extra
> optional packages/configurations and installing by apt-get or any other
> similar toy does not give me that.

I find that the trade off is in another direction.

Installing from packages gives me "more freedom" because I never have
to bother understanding the details of the sources for them.  I don't
need to bother storing any of those details in my head, and I don't
need to do any work managing the sources.

Freedom from managing source code is also of value...

> > If you insist on running postfix from source, you should probably "apt-get
> > install postfix", disable it, and install postfix into a completely
> > separate tree, such as /usr/local or /opt. This ensures that all postfix
> > dependencies are satisfied and that Ubuntu is aware that you have an mta
> > installed.
>
> Thank you. Your comments were helpfull.
>
> When it comes to texinfo, I installed it already.. from source :)

I strongly believe that *in most cases* there is not much to be gained
from installing things from source.  Unless you're building a system
rife with likely-to-be-unmanageable idiosyncracies, it is very likely
that 90% or more of the time, you don't need to have the "special
sauce" from building from sources.

At most, some small percentage of software selections will warrant
being built from source.

I see this at work; in my department, we *do* produce custom builds of
PostgreSQL and Slony-I, and I tend to have half a dozen or so custom
builds of it of varying versions on my workstation.  However, life is
too short for this to extend to everything.  There are vanishingly few
other things on my workstation where source builds are preferable.

Entertainingly, in the AIX environment, the very same is true.
PostgreSQL has various things it depends on that aren't base AIX
libraries.  I need GCC, GNU Make, M4, OpenSSH libraries, Tcl,
readline, and quite a bunch of other libraries for this and that.  Our
sysadmins wind up building GCC because they need that for other
purposes.  All the rest of it we pull in as RPM files.  In the Solaris
days, I got forced to build many of those component libs, but today,
there's little to be gained by it.  It's a pain to manage custom-built
libs.

On Ubuntu (much like Debian), you might find that the preferable way
to handle your Desperate Need For Customized Postfix (which I imagine
is actually a mirage; you probably only think you needed to build it
from sources) is to build your own package for it.

That is, of course, how Debian came into being.  The main point of it
is that each developer wants to customize their favorite package, and
they *don't* feel it valuable to have to spend a lot of time managing
things extraneous to their interests.

Thus, you manage, as source, the few packages you care about,
installing binaries as needed for these packages, and use the binary
forms for the vast majority of packages where you have no reason to
need to care about having idiosyncratic configuration.

If that's totally incompatible with your ways of doing things, perhaps
you should look into Slackware or Gentoo...
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"...  memory leaks  are  quite acceptable  in  many applications  ..."
(Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)
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