[ale] Package Management System

[Jonathan Rickman]

On Saturday 26 July 2003 21:12, Jason Day wrote:

> Sorry, that wasn't at all what I meant to say.  You are right, Debian
> does supoort a wide variety of hardware.  What I meant to say was, all
> *intel* packages are build for the i386, ie, no i686-optimized packages.

One of the great strengths of Linux is it's ability to extend the life of 
older hardware. If I were distributing packaged software, I would certainly 
build for the lowest common denominator where appropriate. However, there 
is very little use in building something like KDE 3.x for i386. Packagers 
probably should look at things like this when deciding what to do. I think 
i586 builds are probably appropriate for the more resource hungry apps, but 
I wouldn't go all the way to i686. Contrary to popular opinion, some apps 
built for i686 DO exhibit problems when running on older CPUs. Particularly 
the AMD K6. This is what forced me to build evolution from source a while 
back, when building evolution was very difficult. I was doing this to 
evaluate it, not use it. Had I been a potential user...I would have deleted 
the source tree and moved on to something else after the first 3 dozen 
errors.

-- 
Jonathan Rickman
X Corps Security
http://www.xcorps.net


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