Slackware not friendly?
 

"Please define 'friendly'". I think we all know what is meant by that word as applied to some software. Now watch this:
This is Slackware 10.2, by someone in this forum called the best Slack distro. Not precisely because of that nice detail, surely for things of greater substance. I am the proud owner of it and have it installed in my second machine. And by its being much less complex than 13.x, I expect to learn a lot of things.

Slackware 10.2 is not maintained anymore, it is advised to upgrade to a newer version. But no, beside that there is no dependancy handling in slackware, slackware is not more unfriendly then any other distribution.

Whatever.

Member Response
 

Hi,
As they say: 'It's in the eye of the beholder'. So a experienced Slackware user would find that Slackware is 'Friendly' and comfortable to use.

Slackware does not need dependency handling or checking. I for one do not need someone to hold my hands. :)

elvis, that lack of dependency handling also means the system is not a hideous mess of intertangled dependencies that cause you to need to install the kitchen sink just to switch the light on.

I would suggest it also makes the maintainers more deliberate in their choices of what to include and what to leave out.

Combined these mean we have a system that is more modular than many

In other words - it's a good thing

oh men, good old workbone....I used it on my Pentium 150Mhz computer running Slackware 9.1. What I never figured out is why the running workbone has no PID? I mean when I issued a 'ps -A' command I never found wokbone on the list of the running processes. I planned to have a look at workbone source code - but I am a man of plans....artsplay from the sound system suite of KDE 3.5 is another example. Once started cannot be stopped - cause it has no PID. How to kill a process without a PID? These two examples suggested to me some time ago to write an application invisible for a user.....Possibly a security threat.... Say imagine workbone multyplying (forking) itself 1 000 000 times.....After a few seconds a system will be unresponsive...The funny thing is that none of these thousands of processes will be registered by the kernel with PID...So issuing 'ps -A' won't help to explain why the system is broken....

For me 'friendly' is also 'simple' - 'friendly system' should be simple....All recent Linux distros suffer of lack of simplicity..So due to my definition - they are 'un-friendly'...Which is really sad....:(

Slackware used to be friendlier. Now you'd need to fix the udev rules to make /dev/sr0 come up as mode 666.

Yes, but sometimes it's nice to have something that can help you to do what you want faster. As an example, bootscript, are script that automate all the boot process. I could say that they hold your hand, and you should be able to do all this alone. Too much hand holding sucks, but if there is totally no hand holding, the system won't be usuable. I think that the line between something that holds your hand and something that is unsuable is pretty small. But, then, it's a very personal decision. I'm not here to start another debate about if slackware should handle dependencie. I'll be honest, I prefer package manager with dependencie handling, but I still use Slackware anyway because Slackware outrun every other linux distribution out there for several others aspects and because in the end, having a package manager that does not handle dependencies, is not THAT bad. I'll always remember the moment when I tried to make a Slackware package for the first time. I was coming from debian, and god, the way that you make packages in slackware IS SO simple to understand compared to debian.

Damn, I wanted to do not start another discussion about dependencies handling...

Or you could just add yourself to the cdrom group ...

On the one hand, I'm happy this thread has been the occassion to make Volkerdi say some words. One the other one, I'd like to know why workbone, the only cli program to play CD in Slackware, and one that makes life so easy, won't work at all in 12.0.

Is there anything else that you'd like to point out to the maintainer of the software in question?

On the whole dependency issue thing. There are situations where a binary package management system with automatic dependency handling saves a lot of grief. For instance, I tried to get wordgrinder to work on Slackware and spent an evening on it trying to get it to work. Unfortunately no dice. For those interested see: http://wordgrinder.sourceforge.net (by the way, wordgrinder is excellent non-distracting console mode wordprocessor for creative writers who just want to concentrate on writing devoid of all fluff)

On the one hand, the simplicity of the packaging system is beautiful. On the other hand, there are some odd software, which is also not available with a SlackBuild that you will have a very difficult time installing on Slackware which is just an apt-get away in Debian. Not all build systems are as easy as ./configure make and make install and sometimes you have to jump through hoops to make a non-standard build configuration work on Slackware. Those days everyone wrote their software in plain C with standard Makefiles with GNU autotools. These days, there are plenty of programming languages and a variety of build systems of increasing complexity making the issue of "from source install" not as trivial.

This is NOT meant to be a flame or an attack on Slackware. This is just the way it is. If this issue annoys you, you'd be better off with other distros which do dependency handling and/or provide a large selection of binary packages.

Software that selects "Prime Mover" as its build tool is almost worthy of the tag "cr*p software" for that alone.

I mean, come on! A build system that is designed to build C code and not much else? Versus using "make" or any other freaking build tool that has been out there for 30 years or so?

Now, if I want to write documents that don't require a GUI to create them and wish to leave the rendering to another layer, I use Docbook and Emacs with nxml mode. I then use the Docbook toolset to render those documents into my output of choice.

Or, gee, there's Skribilo (http://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/) which does the same type of thing only with Guile as the markup language.

wordgrinder, unlike other text-based document processors, is a good tool particularly tailored for non-technical writing without any frills but outputs in quite a few useful formats. It doesn't do text-based mark up, true, I wouldn't say that it is crap. Of course, it uses a non-standard build system and has strange dependencies. That was my point. Many otherwise useful software use non-standard build utils. That doesn't necessarily make them "crap". It just reflects the software creator's preferences in tools.

My point is that, I am less concerned about what programming language or build system the software uses than what it does for me. This is why a binary-based package management works for me: it lets me ignore such aspects and let me concentrate on what I wish to do. Much as I like the Slackware package management simplicity and ignoring the dependency management for a moment, there simply aren't enough pre-built binary packages.

This is an aspect that alone keeps me from using Slackware as my primary distribution even though I do like it a lot in other ways. My software needs are too varied even for a Linux user.

How did this thread get morphed into a discussion of dependency resolution? Even though the OP has a long, separate thread on that subject, here he hasn't said a word about it.