Hi.
Hi Lucas
I agree with you, the software management suite on CRUX is in fact package based, true. But it makes a lot more sense to say that CRUX is source-based if someone asks. Because usually he wants to know whether he can lazily download the packages and install or has to compile them himself. Or in another case he wants to know whether it is facilitated to compile the packages himself and thus inflict his own personal CFLAGS and whatever optimizations he needs/wants/likes to have.
I vote for "it all depends on the context".
I have a question for you though. Why is it bad when people call it a source-based distribution. Is that something to do with honor? Or simply because it's basically, at the core of the statement, wrong even though it's, as illustrated above, practical. ;-)
cheers Philip Stark
P.S: This is my first contribution to this ML. Hello everyone. I am a EE student at ETH in Switzerland.
2009/1/7 <lucas@die.net.au>:
Is it just me or does anyone disagree that CRUX is a source based distro.
1. Release ISOs are shipped with packages. 2. Applications are installed from packages.
After the package is built. what is the point here. you have to compile
To me it's a source based distro as you have to compile, but it has a binary bootstrapping iso to get you started the port to make the package to begin with. I'ts still source based with a binary package cache.
Consider FreeBSD's ports system (and possibly pkgsrc) software is installed directly from the source. An intermediatary package is only built if requested. This in my opinion is a truly source based method.
CRUX in my eyes is simply a package based distro with no central package repository.
For the case of the single user CRUX may appear to be source based due to the absence of a central package repo, but this is naive. I have often had many CRUX boxes all with similar software installed, it would be a horrible waste of time to build packages on every single machine. Naturally you would have a build machine that all other CRUXen could access packages from.
Package based distros with a central package repo are still at their roots, source based. Someone had to compile the source and ship a package. So called package based distros such as debian, archlinux and fedora still have tools for building their preferred package type from source.
The only difference is that CRUX doesn't have the man power (or want) to maintain a central repo and enforce dependency hell on it's users.
</rant>
-- Lucas Hazel <lucas@die.net.au>
Regards, Danny Rawlins