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Comment by raniskeet | Hacker News Reader

either he is full of shit or he doesn't know squat about package management. you can always install from source.

um, your second statement has nothing to do with the first statement. The whole point of a good package management system is so that you don't have to do a

    tar xvzf foo.tar.gz;cd foo;./configure && make;

for every piece of software you want.

Installing from source has no relationship to package management. Even if we compile both library L and application A from tarballs, we're still doomed if there's no database entry somewhere to warn the sysadmins that switching major versions or uninstalling L may blow up A which depends on it.

Glad to see someone else building real OS packages (it's not hard!) rather than hoping that nothing happening outside their single-language ghetto can hurt them.

I don't think he wants to install from source. It sounds like he wants definitive, tested, binary packages.

What is he missing? I use Emacs on the Mac. AquaEmacs is nice. Sometimes getting binaries is a hassle. I use homebrew these days.

Linux is a great platform. However, it's still lacking the polish and commercial support. Where's Photoshop CS5? OmniGraffle? The big thing now is I'm doing iPhone/iPad development. I still have a Linux server but it looks like I'll be doing my main dev on a Mac for the foreseeable future.

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