mimosa wrote:I haven't tried this, but my question would be: what actual problem does it solve?
The main touted advantage seems to be to preclude the need for any package manager. A person can compile any program at all, and (again, assuming either the right flags are set or that that the adapted build process is already automated by the system, etc. etc.), and the entire program will install into its own directory, giving a transparent view of what's actually installed, and reducing the task of uninstalling to deleting a directory (if for some reason e.g. make uninstall fails to delete all installed targets).
mimosa wrote:Here's something really radical:
http://www.nixos.org
Unlike gobolinux, it isn't intended to be a usable everyday system, but it is an experiment around the very real issue of one package breaking another. The Slackware solution to that is to reduce exposure to it by keeping version bumps to once per release cycle wherever possible.
Interesting. It also seems perfectly capable of handling multiple versions of packages, which is something I've wanted to see now and again in the major distros.
That said, I've only ever had a package upgrade cause me any major glitches once that I can recall; the newer version of libsecret (0.16) in the Salix repos doesn't play well with any SlackBuild for seahorse 3.8.x; trying to build 3.9 resulted in outdated versions of other libraries. Luckily, the repo still has 0.15, which solved the problem.
mimosa wrote:Regarding switching DEs, yes, Salix has quite a good selection (WIP). It's a question of the necessary packages being in the repositories, and having been tested together. It also has a number of niche WMs, such as spectrwm or pekwm.
Most of the major ones are, which is definitely a boon. Part of the beauty of the Slack way, though, is that it usually also isn't hard to build a package that *isn't* available (unless, for some God-awful reason, you want, say, libindicate
). This is why I'm so adamant about mentioning slkbuilds to new posters; it's pretty hard to say you lack for anything in Slack or Salix once you know what you're doing. I have updated versions of some of my favorite packages and a music player that's not even available in the repos thanks to the very simple build process of slkbuilds, and those packages work just as well as those avaiable from the repos.
Clearly I'm of the opinion that the Slack setup is perfectly good as it is. I was more or less just curious to see if Gobo offers anything paricularly helpful of its own that's worth giving a look. I imagine I'll try it eventually, but at this point, I'm accustomed enough to the Unix filesystem that it would be mostly just an exercise of curiosity. I can appreciate the intuition that inspired GoboLinux.