Re: [announcement] SYSAPI and SYSSVC for Windows

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> "Ekkehard Morgenstern" <ekkehard.morgenstern@onlinehome.de> writes:
...
> Indeed.  I switched from Red Hat to Debian because the RH distribution
> did not contain some packages I wanted, and when I found RPMs from
> other distros they would often break things.  Debian is the largest of
> all distributions and does not suffer this problem to the same extent,
> because most everything I want is just there already.

I have been trying out Gentoo lately (www.gentoo.org). They seem to
have better Ada packages support than some other distros (this is
important if you're time pressed or lazy ;-). But depending
upon whether or not you insist on compiling everything
from sources or not, it is not for the faint of heart. There is
much less autoconfiguration for things like dhcp, ftp and such.
A "basic system" really is "basic". But I liked that, because you
only add what you expect to use.

Gentoo is great for those that want to compile optimized code for
their system and keep it up to date. In theory, with Gentoo, you
never need to do a system upgrade, since you can update it
piece-meal as time moves on (automated with their emerge command).
For developers like me, this is great (I hate wasting precious
time on system upgrades).

Ada packages support is what coaxed me into trying it. I have a few
small issues with it (bugs to report), and some of the Ada packages
are not fully bug free yet. But they obviously have plans to fix
these at some point. I was impressed to see that they have packaged
things like Booch components and the Charles library (as only two
examples). They have even packaged the cbind tool, for generating
thin Ada bindings from C code.

Compared to Debian, Gentoo has the advantage that they are
more or less, software license agnostic. They support many many
different license schemes, which seems to contrast with Debian.
Depending upon how important this is to you, the Debian approach
may be less than optimal for some users.

Gentoo's ebuild packages concept seems to work well too. Gentoo borrows
some of the good FreeBSD concepts (being source based), and applied
it to Linux. Keep up the good work guys!   See http://www.gentoo.org

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg