[LAU] Noo 'pooter :)

[David Adler]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 03:12:01AM +0200, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2014 23:26:04 +0200 David Adler wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 09:24:39PM +0100, Will Godfrey wrote:
> > 
> > > As this will be a clean install, I'm wondering what people might
> > > suggest as for best distro to make full use of it - all my other
> > > machines have had a progression of debian upgrades so are probably
> > > full of crud.
> > 
> > Use Arch. It might sound counter-intuitive but despite (or because
> > of(?)) the rolling release model it requires very little maintenance. 
> 
> Hi David. I'm alive! ;)

Same here. ;)

> > The regular glimpse on the homepage's news feed is recommended but
> > it's been a long time since anything popped up there that actually
> > required manual intervention. If this happens, the instructions have
> > proven to be adequate. Other than that, occasionally configuration
> > files suffixed *.pacnew/*.pacsave need to be merged and voilà, you
> > have a crud-free up-to-date system that won't send you to dependency
> > hell when attempting to install recent software.
>
...
> I don't completely agree on crud-free. If you install software, run it
> and it creates files in your home directory, then delete the software
> the crud in your home will stick around, but I guess this is the same
> with almost every distro. There might be some system level crud over
> the years, I'm not sure, it didn't cause any problems yet.

Admittedly, I might have overindulged in marketing-speak here. But
package managers not touching stuff in $HOME is a feature, not a bug.
And it's not the distro's fault if some nanny-software unsolicitedly
clutters it with directories like "Audio Projects" or "Video Projects"
(yes, including the white space). Orphaned configuration files in home 
are usually tiny, with just 16 gig of HD I would have noticed if 
otherwise.

I haven't seen system level crud accumulating over the years but maybe I
haven't been looking diligently enough. Whenever "accidentally"
installing bloated stuff like a Java VM, 'packman -Rsn' will elegantly 
solve this -- the distro is not to blame. :)

> AUR could use a going-over though, there's quite some audio stuff there
> that's not building, no longer available or whatever. Even if
> someone takes the time it's still somewhat difficult though since speps
> still sits on most audio packages like a hen.

Agreed, there you touched a disadvantage of Arch compared to Debian.
Many packages that would be installable via apt are only found in AUR
and are of mixed quality. The speps-phenomenon is awkward indeed,
especially considering (s)he's filed as "trusted user". In many cases, 
the AUR really is more of a starting point for DIY than a serious 
repository.


regards,
 -david