Re: [Flightgear-devel] Preferred development os

[LeeE <le...@sp...>]

Hello Harry,

I've never tried installing terragear on any of my systems so I've 
no idea if it's easy to do or what problems you'll have to work 
around.  However, trying to keep up with FG cvs did become too 
problematic for me in the end and I will most likely just stick to 
the rather old version that gets released with Lenny for the 
immediate future.  It's not an ideal solution but because FG isn't 
the most important app on my systems the overhead in setting my 
systems up and maintaining them just to meet FG's requirements 
becomes disproportionate and doesn't make sense.

If you're setting up the system primarily to run FG however, this 
doesn't apply, but in any case, I'd still start with a distro 
that's based on newer versions of software than Debian.

I guess it comes down to identifying your primary requirements of 
the system.

LeeE

On Tuesday 10 February 2009, Harry Campigli wrote:
> Thanks for the reply Lee,
>
> Your comments all noted, especially with respect to stability, as
> opposed to bleeding edge.
>
> Thats fine with me as I have always been behind a release with
> Suse from 6 to 10 running machines as routers and servers over
> the last 10 years. Those machines only ever rebooted when the
> power outage outlasted the ups. I recall one uptime over 8
> months. Something unheard of in the windows world I guess.
>
>
> And no problems with your comments the Flightgear again I build
> the requirements like Simgear and osg from source anyway, and
> could see no reason to update from SUSE 10.3 unless the
> Terramodel solution suited and one of them droped a drive.
>
> I was pretty happy the basics just ran on etch, although FG
> compiled with a small audio bug.
>
> I don't know much about Terragear because I have never succeeded
> in building it. But i gather the CVS is a mix of mainly old with
> some new.
>
> Are you running Terragear on your Debian machine?
>
>
>
> Regards Harry
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:40 PM, LeeE <le...@sp...> 
wrote:
> > Hello Harry,
> >
> > I've been a long-time user of Debian, in fact, it's the only
> > distribution I've really used, so while I'm not qualified to
> > comment on other distros I think I've learned some of the pros
> > & cons of using Debian.
> >
> > I would say that Debian's greatest plus feature is the
> > stability and consistency of it's stable releases, and I would
> > say that it's greatest negative feature is a consequence of
> > it's greatest plus feature; it will always be using dated, or
> > older versions of software.
> >
> > This is fine if the older versions of software that end up in
> > the Debian stable distros are sufficient for your needs or you
> > are developing your own software and don't need or wish to use
> > 'bleeding-edge' versions of development libraries and packages
> > etc. to make your software work.  For something like FlightGear
> > however, which largely requires the latest versions of quite a
> > few other packages, it can be a problem.  For example, if you
> > wish to keep up to date with FG development and work with the
> > cvs version of FG you won't be able to use the version of OSG
> > in etch but will have to get a later version from the OSG
> > project and install it yourself, which may in turn require
> > later versions of other packages too.  Now this may be ok if
> > you don't use any other Debian packages that depend upon OSG
> > but if you do you'll then hit dependency problems.  There are
> > ways around this but they'll require some degree, and sometimes
> > a lot, of extra work and housekeeping to keep everything
> > working.  Incidentally, regarding OSG, I think the version that
> > will end up in Lenny, which will soon become the next stable
> > release (perhaps even this year - lol), will be OSG 2.4.0,
> > which will still be too old for the current release version of
> > FG.  It also looks like the Debian version of FG that will be
> > released with Lenny is 1.0.0.
> >
> > You could try using Debian's unstable distro but you need to be
> > aware that it's a constantly moving target where dependencies
> > are frequently broken.  You really need a testing system if
> > you're going to run unstable, to test updates before you roll
> > them out to the machines you depend upon to work.  You also
> > really need to maintain your own partial mirror too, if you
> > want to keep several systems in step because it's likely that
> > there will have been further updates between the time you
> > finish testing one set of updates and then start rolling them
> > out to your other machines.
> >
> > Debian's testing distro varies a lot depending on the current
> > point in the Debian release cycle.  Around now, where Lenny has
> > largely been frozen and where the current focus is on
> > bug-squashing and final testing, it is very stable, but once
> > it's actually been promoted and released as the new stable,
> > testing will become very unstable and sometimes even less
> > stable than unstable (speaking from experience) until it too is
> > frozen.
> >
> > So perhaps for something like FG, Ubuntu might be a better bet,
> > as it's based more on unstable than stable, with new versions
> > of software being brought forward much more quickly than with
> > Debian.
> >
> > LeeE
> >
> >
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