On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 08:22:35PM -0500, John R. Dennison wrote: > Is this vitriol really necessary? I installed ganglia; not a > single conflict. Why yes, John, it is. The fine man said outright he didn't believe my honest account, accusing me of making something up when I was only giving the facts. He was calling me a liar. He preferred to see my account as a lie so as not to surrender his faith that Ganglia is a pure and perfect project. Attitudes like that are dangerous in computing, since they lead to bugs not being fixed. > If you want shiny and new, why not do it properly and build > rpms? You installed without a conflict, good. Perhaps you were installing on a 32-bit system rather than a 64-bit? Perhaps your system didn't have some of the packages already installed for other functionality that mine did? All I can say is that, for my system, yum saw version conflicts that were blockers. As for "properly," there are, as Larry Wall says, many ways to do it. It is up to each project, as their first task, IMHO, to see to it that ./configure, make, make install works for their package, with proper, documented flags, on standard Linux distros. Ganglia - a fine and valuable project on the whole - has a broken "make install." But it can be worked around. Finding workarounds is often a sysadmins job. Sharing those workarounds with the community is often how free software stays ahead of the proprietary stuff. On the whole, this list is professional. I like that. But look, "./configure, make, make install" is _always_ a proper option. Any serious business will have need of building on occassional program with different flags than the distro's default, whatever the distro. I often end up building a few core applications that way, as do many other sysadmins in serious business settings. If you don't need to, that's fine. Some businesses can wear off-the-rack cloths. Others need tailored garments. Regards, Whit