[conspire] debian 3.0_r4 .iso's? and a rant against GNU's libtool(1)

[Eric De Mund]

Rick,

Do you have debian-3.0r4 .iso's available for burning at your house,
were I to visit with a handful of CD-R's?

I know they're not strictly necessary, but I'm a pack rat and like to
have a distribution's full shebang on hand. I'm finally about to make
the switch over to Debian on my main machine this weekend.

I became very fed up this week with a whole raft of things while trying
to get openbox(1), obconf(1), fbpanel(1), and gdeskcal(1) up and running
on host chickamauga, my Slackware system:

    - GNU's libtool(1)

      I'm *extremely* disappointed with the design of this! It appears
      to be designed in such a way that I cannot have Slackware .tgz
      packages installed under /usr, my own manually compiled packages
      installed under /usr/local, and the two living harmoniously to-
      gether. Or, more precisely, libtool(1) does not appear to permit
      me to successfully build some packages to be placed under the
      latter without referencing some shared libraries installed under
      the former, no matter that I've set my LD_LIBRARY_PATH explicitly.
      libtool(1) appears to have a hard-coded library path of its own,
      within it that I cannot override.

Actually, everything in the raft boiled down to that one point,
libtool(1). In "the old days", I could build and install my own pack-
ages, without fail, using the classic trio of "configure; make; make
install". Given libtool(1), pkg-config(1), and /usr/lib/pkgconfig, it
appears that the "configure; make; make install" model of building pack-
ages from source, referencing libraries of one's own choosing, is not
quite extant. As a control freak, *I* want to maintain control of which
types of packages get installed under /usr and which get installed under
/usr/local; I can't abide an overarching model which dictates its own
terms to me.

Hopefully, this isn't the case under Debian. However, even if it is so:

    - I'll be able to upgrade my system without having to do a complete
      install of the OS each time a new version comes out; and

    - I'll have a much larger number of packages to choose from, making
      hand-compiles less necessary.

By the way, I did get openbox(1), obconf(1), and fbpanel(1) up and
running, and I do like them. If I can configure openbox(1) so that:

    - I can map my own actions to mouse-clicks in window titlebars
      (starting with swapping the actions of the middle- and right-
      mouse-clicks);

    - I can have have some windows minimizing to desktop icons rather
      than to the fbpanel; and

    - I can modify some of fbpanel(1)'s behavior (e.g. clock displaying
      MM/dd HH:mm; menus configurable by me)

then I'll be really happy.

Cheers,
Eric
--
"Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use
the editorial 'we'." --Mark Twain

Eric De Mund              |   Ixian Systems, Inc.   | cell: 650.303.4336
email: <ead at ixian.com>    | 650 Castro St, #120-210 |  fax: 240.282.4443
http://www.ixian.com/ead/ | Mountain View, CA 94041 | Y!IM: ead0002