Comment here's what I've been doing lately (Score 1) 23
I felt the same way about RPM (and other quirks of RedHat that I won't go into) not too long ago and switched from RedHat back to Slackware. I picked Slackware simply because that was one of the distributions that I was very familiar with and I had used it quite a lot in the earlier days of Linux.
I've been hearing lots of praise for ease of updates and package management from debian users, so you might want to check out debian-- particularily if simplified updating and package management are your motivation. I was also looking for more lightweight initialization scripts that I could more easily modify, so that was another reason for Slackware v. RedHat.
I did a fairly basic install and built up the rest from source. I put most everything under /usr/local, but there are a few exceptions. GNOME, for example, I put in its own directory (/usr/local/GNOME) so I can cleanly 'rm' the entire tree when I need to clean up unstable binaries/libs.
Note that you will still have to deal with dependencies and libraries-- you just won't have a package manager warning you about it. More than likely you will find out either when your compile from source fails or an app you built fails to work properly. This happens more with development libraries and projects built from cvs (which you mentioned interest in enlightenment from cvs), so expect to have some occassional update cycles there.
One thing that got me recently, though it is not really that big of a deal, was when I upgraded to XFree86-4. I lost some of the older libs that things like Acrobat Reader are looking for, so those no longer run. I don't use it enough for it to matter, but things like that can happen- update one thing, break several others. Of course, had I not installed X into a fresh directory tree, I could have avoided the problem, but I wanted to start clean and didn't mind breaking a few things temporarily.
All in all, it has worked out pretty well for me and my system seems stable. I would also recommend that you keep a copy of the source that you build. I move source directories that I've built to /usr/local/src/built. This has come in handy several times when a library update required rebuilding a few things.
One thing I did consider was building my install from the ground up-- as you mentioned. Actually I was thinking about starting from a minimal distro like tomsrtbt or trinux. I ultimately had to face the harsh reality that I just didn't have that much time. But you will definitely learn a lot and several people have done that successfully if you decide to try it.
Good Luck,
-Phil
I've been hearing lots of praise for ease of updates and package management from debian users, so you might want to check out debian-- particularily if simplified updating and package management are your motivation. I was also looking for more lightweight initialization scripts that I could more easily modify, so that was another reason for Slackware v. RedHat.
I did a fairly basic install and built up the rest from source. I put most everything under
Note that you will still have to deal with dependencies and libraries-- you just won't have a package manager warning you about it. More than likely you will find out either when your compile from source fails or an app you built fails to work properly. This happens more with development libraries and projects built from cvs (which you mentioned interest in enlightenment from cvs), so expect to have some occassional update cycles there.
One thing that got me recently, though it is not really that big of a deal, was when I upgraded to XFree86-4. I lost some of the older libs that things like Acrobat Reader are looking for, so those no longer run. I don't use it enough for it to matter, but things like that can happen- update one thing, break several others. Of course, had I not installed X into a fresh directory tree, I could have avoided the problem, but I wanted to start clean and didn't mind breaking a few things temporarily.
All in all, it has worked out pretty well for me and my system seems stable. I would also recommend that you keep a copy of the source that you build. I move source directories that I've built to
One thing I did consider was building my install from the ground up-- as you mentioned. Actually I was thinking about starting from a minimal distro like tomsrtbt or trinux. I ultimately had to face the harsh reality that I just didn't have that much time. But you will definitely learn a lot and several people have done that successfully if you decide to try it.
Good Luck,
-Phil
