>>8
GNU Hippy detected.
Been running Linux since the mid 90s. I currently run it on several 100 machines in a datacenter.
I have never once called it GNU/Linux.
Take your political correctness and eat a bowl of dicks,
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as /prague/, is in fact, sage//prague/, or as I've recently taken to calling it, sage plus /prague/.
>>35
Real operating systems keep track of package files, so if you don't have time to make a proper .deb or .rpm it's nice to make your program install to /opt or /usr/local by default to avoid conflicts and leaving garbage around. Apparently Ruby maintainers are nice.
Name:
Anonymous2010-10-16 15:24
>>36
On Debian, /opt would be even better, since I think a few things install to /usr/local. On Slackware, /usr/local is for locally-compiled, unpackaged software. No exceptions.
Name:
Anonymous2010-10-16 17:05
My desktop runs Arch Linux and my server runs FreeBSD. Referring to the comments above, Arch Linux has the same philosophy for locally-compiled packages that Slackware does.
>>28,29
You two need to fuck off back to Reddit until you actually understand why every package manager except Arch's uses signed packages.
Arch has the same target audience as Anonix: stupid teenagers who don't actually know how anything works, but still feel they can do a better job.
>>36,39
I switched to Arch because Ubuntu broke during upgrades and Fedora's package manager wouldn't even run half the time (because you can only run one copy of Yum at a time, and some background process will be holding the lock to check for updates -- I got really pissed at Yum). I didn't want to go back to Gentoo because it's for ricers. Arch's pacman is a bit lame but at least it seems to work fairly consistently, and it's nice that you don't have to install "-devel" and "-doc" packages for everything.
And the Debian maintainers aren't so stupid that they'd allow a package to put things in /usr/local. Seriously, the Debian team is wonderful about this kind of stuff. Their standards for packages are IMHO the best standards for Linux packages out there.
[quote]
Normally, programs install themselves in the /usr/local subdirectory. Since it is reserved for system administrator's (or user's) private use, Debian packages must not use that directory but should use system directories such as the /usr/bin subdirectory following the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
[/quote]
And /opt is for stuff that you don't always want in your PATH, so that's why a Python/Ruby installation might go there -- so root and other users will still use the system's Python/Ruby in /usr or /usr/local.