OT: Whose packages to use?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 08:54:35PM -0400, John Esak wrote:
> From: Bill Campbell [mailto:bill at celestial.com]:
> > When we made the switch from Caldera, I also made the decision to
> > build around the OpenPKG.org portable packaging system after
> > reading an article on this is SysAdmin magazine.  This has
> > enabled me to do minimal changes to the underlying OS.  As you
> > may know, my SCO installations have used a lot of open source
> > software for well over a decade now, and we did quite a bit of
> > customization on Caldera Linux as well to get things to my
> > liking.  Unfortuntately, before using OpenPKG, these changes
> > generally rendered vendor updates useless as I had changed many
> > things fundamental to their operation.  OpenPKG has simplified my
> > job immensely, and we now can switch Linux OS in about a day, and
> > use the same sources on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, and OpenServer.

This does have one disadvantage, though, Bill: as soon as you start 
packaging your own apps, *you* take on the responsibility for tracking
all those apps for security fixes, and all the testing, etc...

This is one of the reasons I personally prefer to stick with 
the distro's packages (or the app supplier's), whenever possible.  The 
tradeoff seems a win to me...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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