On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 09:27:37PM +0100, mbm wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:39:24 +0100 "Srdjan Todorovic" todorovic.s@googlemail.com allegedly wrote:
Is that no silly-er than me illustrating my point by saying that http://packages.slackware.it/search.php?v=current&t=1&q=gstreamer has no specific development package of its own, given that we're now comparing different distros (and package management schemes)?
Sorry, but no I don't agree. The original question was about the Chris's problems with compiling gnome-alarm when the configure script complained about the (apparent absence) of gstreamer. Chris said he had it installed (as indeed he had). I suggested that he install the development package. Chris responded that there was no dev package for gstreamer and used a yum listing as evidence. Noting that this is distro specific, I responded with an aptitude listing (equally distro specific) to show that dev packages do exist.
People seem to have missed the irony, but hey, never mind.
A simple search on rpmfind or rpmbone will lead to the development packages.
Of course, that may not solve Chris's problem. In my experience, rpm is a crap package manager which does not handle dependencies at all well.
I think the issue is more that there is a much larger (and often more up to date) range of software available in the Ubuntu/Debian world than there is in the Fedora world.
Yes, OK, using Fedora I can, if the package isn't available in the main Yum repositories, go and look for an rpm but that can lead one to lots of places one doesn't want to get to.
I was a long time Slackware user (i.e. for five or six years at least) and moved to Fedora only a couple of years ago. I chose Fedora over Ubuntu and others at that time because it seemed to me at the time that it was a slightly more 'techie' distribution and, coming from Slackware, that was what I wanted.
However I put Ubuntu Server on my garage 'NAS' box recently and was impressed with the ease of installation and the wide range (and ease) of adding quite esoteric software. In particular, for example, there's an Ubuntu package for vile my favourite vi clone whereas on Fedora I had to compile it myself. I also found that Ubuntu's "do everything using sudo" really isn't the issue that I thought it was.
Thus my next desktop installation is going to be Ubuntu I think.