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If the "cliché" is so outdated, why was I building apps from source just earlier this weak? Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I've never found myself doing that on the

by paul 17y ago

If the "cliché" is so outdated, why was I building apps from source just earlier this weak? Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I've never found myself doing that on the iPhone... It's amazing to me that people here would think that Linux has anywhere near the level of simplicity that the iPhone has. I don't even know where to start explaining...

SwellJoe 17y ago
Linux, on your desktop or server, isn't something a reasonable person would compare to an iPhone. If you'd like to talk about Android devices vs. an iPhone, there are useful comparisons to be made (and Android may not come out ahead in all such comparisons). I'll also ask what Linux distribution you're using, that would lead you to building things from source on a regular basis? I build things from source as part of my job and I don't even do it more than a couple of times per month. Nearly everything I use on my servers and desktops is available from yum or apt-get repositories, and it would never cross my mind to build from source, except for the tiny number of packages I need either custom build of, or I'm the developer of. When I've maintained Mac and Windows servers, on the other hand, I was building software all the time. Everything I used had to be built from source. This has improved a little bit over the years, particularly on Mac OS X, in the form of fink, but a lack of a good standard package manager in Mac OS X and Windows is a major deterrent from me using them. Keeping on top of updates on a stack of a couple dozen packages all built from source, is a security and stability nightmare.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Why don't you tell me why you were compiling from source? I don't see how playing guessing games helps. I recently installed the latest SVN snapshots of an unreleased version of a fairly geeky media centre app including the latest support for my GPU's video acceleration capabilities all without compiling anything from source so if you've got a valid reason to do so then I'm thinking it's going to be obscure. I'm fairly confident that whatever you where doing wouldn't even be allowed on the iPhone, so the average user limiting themselves to the many thousands of apps delivered via their default repository doesn't have to worry about missing anything in this (somewhat contrived) comparison.

by paul 17y ago

SwellJoe 17y ago

Linux, on your desktop or server, isn't something a reasonable person would compare to an iPhone. If you'd like to talk about Android devices vs. an iPhone, there are useful comparisons to be made (and Android may not come out ahead in all such comparisons). I'll also ask what Linux distribution you're using, that would lead you to building things from source on a regular basis? I build things from source as part of my job and I don't even do it more than a couple of times per month. Nearly everything I use on my servers and desktops is available from yum or apt-get repositories, and it would never cross my mind to build from source, except for the tiny number of packages I need either custom build of, or I'm the developer of. When I've maintained Mac and Windows servers, on the other hand, I was building software all the time. Everything I used had to be built from source. This has improved a little bit over the years, particularly on Mac OS X, in the form of fink, but a lack of a good standard package manager in Mac OS X and Windows is a major deterrent from me using them. Keeping on top of updates on a stack of a couple dozen packages all built from source, is a security and stability nightmare.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Why don't you tell me why you were compiling from source? I don't see how playing guessing games helps. I recently installed the latest SVN snapshots of an unreleased version of a fairly geeky media centre app including the latest support for my GPU's video acceleration capabilities all without compiling anything from source so if you've got a valid reason to do so then I'm thinking it's going to be obscure. I'm fairly confident that whatever you where doing wouldn't even be allowed on the iPhone, so the average user limiting themselves to the many thousands of apps delivered via their default repository doesn't have to worry about missing anything in this (somewhat contrived) comparison.