From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,8a402d78988bdf2b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-12-19 10:21:30 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-01!sn-xit-09!supernews.com!216.170.153.135.MISMATCH!tdsnet-transit!newspeer.tds.net!cyclone.bc.net!news-in.mts.net!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: [announcement] SYSAPI and SYSSVC for Windows References: <%VlDb.5454$Pg1.1321@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:14:55 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.223.163 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1071857651 198.96.223.163 (Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:14:11 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:14:11 EST Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:3578 Date: 2003-12-19T13:14:55-05:00 List-Id: Ludovic Brenta wrote: > "Ekkehard Morgenstern" 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