[Ardour-Users] Compiling Ardour ?

[lanas]

Le Samedi, 26 Janvier 2008 16:42:10 -0800,
Josh Parmenter <josh at realizedsound.net> a écrit :

> I'm constantly amazed (and saddened for nando) about the rate of  
> change in Fedora. On Mac, I was quite grateful for the Leopard
> delay. I guess the only solution (if you want slower development)
> would be to switch to Windows where OS changes take many years.

I must say that I do not agree with this.  An extreme is not an
alternative to another extreme.  What would prevent a smooth upgrade
path scaled over time instead of sudden version changes ?

I might be inexperienced in the domain of world-distributed distros and
what I see is that dramatic changes in glibc would warrant a similar
theatrical major version change.  And that is, if you want really to
upgrade glibc as if you'd like very much to drive in a brand new car
knowing very well that you loose $5,000 has soon as you get out of the
dealership's garage. So to speak.

I mean, careful ponderation should be exercized.  For instance, does
the new ardour need the new glibc badly ?  I think not.  And I think
not for many, many packages.  Not even the kernel.

So I think it is very possible to simply keep the upgrades of the
packages without changing to a new major release.  You might not get
the latest Windows-compatible KDE based on the
global-mobile-satellite-ready newest Qt but then, what are the users
_really_ loosing ?  Can they wait a year or more for the next major
release if you provide in the meanwhile a smooth upgrade path to most
of the major packages including security patches and kernel upgrades
without the need to reinstall an OS ? I think many can.

It sure beats having to reinstall an OS every 3 months and, as the case
is for audio work, harrassing Fernando for brand-new packages because
now that the new OS verison is installed, one has to wait for the audio
packages to be ready so that one can make music.  This is nonsense.  At
beat it provides great times to play that accoustic guitar and record
sketches on a portable mp3 recorder ! ;-)

On one hand we had a Windows OS that had to be reinstalled every once
in a while for any kind of reasons and on the other hand we have Linux
systems that asks you to reinstall steadily a few times per year.

I guess I could be ready for Debian but I ran homemade Linux systems
built from scratch (eg. LFS) for many years both professionally and at
home, running VmWare, MuSE, and all apps under WindowMaker.  I steered
out of the way a few years ago but now I'm back at it and really, my
experience with pre-packaged Linux distros is all right, but when it
comes down to it, a homemade maintained Linux distro always had my
favor for stability of both OS and applications.  You know what's going
on in there, and the boot scripts are not by any means like labyrinths
of artificial intelligence.

I guess I prefer dumber and stable over fancy and erratic :-)

Thanks for reading, I hope you found that entertaining.

Cheers,

Al