Re: [Gnu-arch-users] The future of GNU Arch users

[Toby White]

address@hidden (James Blackwell) writes:

> This doesn't mean you _can't_ upgrade to baz. It means you don't want to
> upgrade to baz. That's a fair and reasonable thing. I used to have the
> same problem on slackware a long while ago, a problem that disapeared when
> I moved to Debian (I started on bo). These days, most modern distros
> either have (Debian and Redhat based distros) or shortly will have apt-get
> support.

But it's not Linux I'm worried about - anything will compile on a Linux
by and large if you're prepared to upgrade packages. My problem is
that I want to run arch/tla/baz on other Unix OSes. As I say, this
was fine with tla, since all I needed was the bare gnu essentials, 
plus an ANSI C compiler.

>> And bzr is not an option - I don't mind it being written in Python; I
>> can usually find a version of Python on most hosts, but its requiring 
>> minimum 2.4 makes it useless to me.
>
> 2.4 is admittedly a high target. However, by December (the target release
> date for bzr) 2.4 will be the common version out there. 
>
> What are you running for an operating system?

On my desktop, I'm running Debian testing - I've no problem using 
anything there. My problems arise mostly on various Solaris, and AIX 
hosts; generally all OS releases from the last couple of years, 
but these are large supercomputers where the system administrators 
will not install a new version of Python just to suit me. Also there's
couple of recent Linux Opteron clusters where the system Python is
2.3, and again, they're not going upgrade it just for me.

> My sincere advice is to stick with tla for as long as it continues to meet
> your needs and then migrate to bzr when you are ready (such as when python
> 2.4 is on many of your machines). As long as youre internally focused you
> should be able to continue on with tla for awhile.

Fair enough. I was vaguely hoping for a bugfix tla release, to pick up
baz improvements without requiring all dependent libraries. But I don't
suppose there's much motivation for anyone to do that.

-- 
Dr. Toby White 
Dept. of Earth Sciences, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ. UK
Email: <address@hidden>