[NCLUG] Bad question I know!

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 12:28:58PM -0600, mike cullerton wrote:
>now, i use slackware, download source, compile my own binaries and put them
>where they make sense to me. i'm not a big fan of gui interfaces to

I actually started using RedHat *BECAUSE* of using Slackware.  The nice
thing about having a package manager is that it knows what files it's
installed, and therefore it can fairly easily back out packages that you no
longer want, remove old files when upgrading to a new version, etc...  If
you corrupt or overwrite a file, you can simply ask the package manager
"Hey, what files have been modified?"

After 18 months of using a slackware system, I knew that if I had to
re-load it, I'd have a very hard time bringing it back up to where it was
before the re-load.  What packages did I have installed, for example.  Then
I installed a sendmail patch 4 hours too late, and got a root compromise.
I couldn't just re-install the OS files and copy over /usr/local -- I
didn't trust the binaries that were on the system...

On the other hand, after 18 months, it was kind of time to do a reload
anyway -- cruft left over from packages I tried and removed, or upgraded to
new versions of.  This was back when I was lucky to have a 2GB hard drive,
so it was kind of hard to say "Aww, I don't need to worry about trying to
clean up the 100MB of cruft the old version of gcc left laying around."

I pretty much build everything from source, but I do so in the context of
an RPM.  The RPM combines the pristine source to the package, with any
patches, and a recipe describing how to build the binaries, and what the
resulting list of files and directories are which get installed.

It's building from source, in a reproducable way...  The production
sysadmin in me finds comfort in that.

Sean
-- 
 A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human
 history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
                 -- Mitch Ratcliffe
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python