> I was writing about memory usage, not system size. 



Oh, mea culpa, I was about disk size...



> Were there any efforts undertook to bring to SL/RH world NetBSD's pkgsrc package management?

> It is based on one fact - that all applications are born in source first. :) 

> Second, all binaries go to /usr/pkg directory! No more /usr, /usr/local, etc Linux direcotory idiosyncrasy




Jesus Christ! (Insert your God here, Richard Dawkins allowed too :-))

RHEL's (or TUV's) rebuilds like SL and CentOS are _meant_ to be STABLE! I guess you want Fedora for trying all kind of tricky stuff, right? (If Fedora is too buggy, it's not my fault.)

Really, I suppose people would tell you that most of the 3rd-party repos are actually "not recommended" to be used, and even EPEL... oh wait, let's say EPEL _might_ be a good choice, I can't tell yet. But as long as you mess with your system, you're on your own anyway. (With the original upstream distro, once you've added a 3rd party package, your system is not supported anymore if you have an issue!)

I know pkgsrc is a great idea, it's just you should rather try to use it with Gentoo or Slackware, not with SL5 :-)


As for "all applications are born in source first", I agree, but I strongly disagree with the fact that you should compile a lot of packages -- this is why I refuse to use Gentoo: after all,:
(1) FLOSS means you have the sources, for the case you would *want* to build/fix/modify/rebuild, but you shouldn't be *forced* to build from sources!
(2) It's 101% un-ecological! Why having 2,000 people wasting their CPU time and lifetime to build the same package 2,000 times, when a single-time build + establishing a binary repository would be definitely a better approach? 

IMHO, you should only build from sources when: (a) the application is of less interest so you're not upstream-provided with a binary package; (b) you want to try the latest and hottest version; (c) you want to fix some bugs and rebuild it.

This is why people should try to use binary packages with EL clones.

Cheers,
R-C





      Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail.  Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca