After the flood of Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 reviews, here is a review of PC-BSD 1.3 Beta. "PC-BSD has improved quite a bit and the use of its open-source PBI packaging system is a great idea. Although it obviously means there might be a minor delay in newly released products being ported over to the PBI package system, novice users will rejoice because the wait is well worth it. PC-BSD is a well oiled machine with its quick response times, even if you don't have that much memory in your system. Its implementation of a clean interface is welcomed by me and not having a 3D enabled desktop is not something I really would worry about unless you are an eye-candy lover."
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Member since:2005-07-24
"""Well, I thought it might catch your attention that way 
"""
It did. ;-)
"""I can't reply with "we, in the BSD community" simply because this is not a sect or something, and I'm not qualified to represent the BSD community as such."""
That's reasonable. I was wrong to try to speak for the Linux community. It makes me sound like Eric Raymond and I am suitably embarrassed. ;-)
"""I consider this trolling. FUD is also an apt term for what you do: you harp about the doom of PC-BSD, while spreading obvious lies about its package management."""
Hmmm. Those are harsh words. "Trolling", "FUD". "harp", "lies".
I know more about PBI now than I did at the beginning of this thread. It's not as bad as I thought it was at first. But I think that the BSD folks will be able to come up with something better. Something less source-centric than ports, but less binary-centric than PBI. That's a compliment.
For a few posts now, I have been saying that I am content to wait and watch how well PBI does relative to other package management systems.
Does that clarify matters? Do I still sound like a FUDing, lying, harping troll? ;-)
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-09-10
Does that clarify matters? Do I still sound like a FUDing, lying, harping troll? ;-)
Yes, it clarifies matters. A bit. Now if you are interested... FreeBSD has a hybrid system: ports and packages. You can easily build a binary package from ports (as easily as passing "-p" to portinstall/portupgrdade - and a binary package will land in /usr/ports/packages). These packages will be - for all intents and purposes - very similar to your .deb or .rpm. They know about dependencies, and the pkg_* system will try to resolve them automatically. How PBIs relate to this? If you check out a PBI creation howto, you'll find out that they use binary (.tbz) FreeBSD packages (that are regularly built from ports by the FreeBSD package building clusters).
So they took those packages (or use one build by himself - I did it with all the packs I maintained) - and check what runtime dependencies they have. These fall into two categories: they are either 100% present on all PC-BSD installs or not. The former is a much much larger group then the latter, and only in the latter case will you need to include some extra libs. You can do a real life comparison of PBIs and RPMs - and you will see very small size differences (see openoffice.org) - because most shared libraries PBIs need are counted on to be present on your system.
So that's it. Basically PBIs have one (BIG) dependency and one extra feature (compared to .rpm or .deb): the dependency is PC-BSD, and the extra feature is the possibility to include extra libs in the binary. That's all what PBIs are, and it would be relatively easy to implement such a system for any linux - it's just that noone tried it yet. Whether PC-BSD and the PBI system lives or dies is yet to be seen. But it won't fail because of the reasons you cited. That was a bit dramatic, I mean your rant about missing shared library support and the inevitable doom of the PBI concept as a consequence, but so were my replies 
Especially when I saw you repeating things that I know were not true, and I thought you deliberately ignore my clarifications (which in my book, would classify you as a troll). Maybe I was wrong. If so, than I apologize.
But I think that the BSD folks will be able to come up with something better.
They already did Yes, yes, I'm obviously biased, but the ports/packages infrastructure is way better then any package management I have found in the *nix world. It's not just source build ala gentoo - it's a whole infrastructure. Check out freshports.org to see what I mean. And its a maintenance paradise: I maintain a small comp lab with a few freebsd desktops (old machines with limited functionality, newer machines are WindowsXP). I build binary packages on my own machine by simply passing -p to portinstall. The binary packages are automatically arranged exactly the same way as on the official binary repositories (under /usr/ports/packages) so all I have to do is point those old machines to my FTP server, and everything will be installed/updated from my puter, with a single command. Wonderful And it takes almost nothing. Normally I use portinstall whatnot or portupgrade -a to maintain my home computer, and the only effort I have to make to keep several machines up to date is to use portinstall -p whatnot and portupgrade -ap instead.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-09-10
Judging from the bold and the BOLDED CAPS you seem kind of defensive.
Because clearly, you don't understand how PBIs work. Now it is clear that you simply don't want to understand. I gave specific examples in my posts, and yet, you are still at it: trying to convince people that PC-BSD's package management will fail, because they don't use shared libraries - which, as I pointed out numerous times, they actually do.
Most of the BSD users I personally know are also linux users btw - and so am I (mainly archlinux). Besides, this has nothing to do with linux vs bsd (especially not about the relative wisdom of these communities 
. Simply I pointed out - using specific examples - that your perception of the PBI system is wrong. You consistently ignored that, and kept repeating the same thing over and over. I consider this trolling. FUD is also an apt term for what you do: you harp about the doom of PC-BSD, while spreading obvious lies about its package management. At first, I gave you the benefit of a doubt that you are simply mistaken, and once you learn how actually PBIs work, you'll stop. Clearly, I was wrong.
Well, I thought it might catch your attention that way
One thing that we have learned in the Linux community is that you can't be rude and expect to be a hit with new users. Judging from your comments, this seems a lesson that BSD has yet to learn.
This, like so many of your posts, doesn't make any sense. I can't reply with "we, in the BSD community" simply because this is not a sect or something, and I'm not qualified to represent the BSD community as such. It would be a sad day when you could make claims in the name of the linux community without being laughed at
Have a nice day.