[conspire] Ubuntu 6.10 [was Re: ... distro news]

[David E. Fox]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:22:10 -0800
Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:


> do risky or problematic things (like using third-party package sources)
> but expect magical self-correction from the OS.  I'd be thunderstruck if

That's risky in any environment. I had a similar situation happen when I
was using Mepis; gradually I was moving it to Debian via successive
apt-get installs & upgrades - eventually it caused problems. At the
time, Mepis was a mix of testing & unstable - and Debian sarge was just
about to be the official version, IIRC. Even given that Mepis (at the
time) was nearly all Debian (except for a small quantity of disk real
estate for 'mekb' and other contributed package), it was problematical.
Eventually I decided to go with an install of straight debian, and
anything 'foreign' is relegated to /usr/local.

(Even putting stuff there can cause problems from time to time, as I
will occasionally find something neat, put it in /usr/local, leave it
alone for a while (even use it) and then a few months down the road,
bingo, the thing rears its ugly head, and the distro experiences
problems because the incompatible thing in /usr/local is being found
instead of the one that's needed.)


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