slackware 7.1

It was inevitable, I suppose -- I started with Slackware GNU/Linux four years ago, and I've come back to it now. I must installed Slackware 7.1 on my laptop (I clobbered Debian 2.2 to do it), and I'm pretty happy with it. Almost every disctribution that I've tried has required that I install additional packages to get things like VIM to build (I like to embed Perl in my VIM, so I always need to rebuild it when I setup a new machine), but with Slackware, it worked right away, with the default install. Sweeet.

packaging systems, and reading code

All the talk lately of packaging systems got me thinking about them, and, of the three that I have used (rpm, deb, and slackware's tgz), I have to say that I prefer the slackware style tarballs. This is mainly, I believe, because I like to handle dependencies manually; I have a terrible habit of trying to read through the code for everything I install (or as much as is reasonable). This is one of the reasons that binary distributions of anything annoy me; I think that any packaging system "standard" should mandate the inclusion of source code as part of the package. Binaries go into /usr/bin, man pages into /usr/man, source into /usr/src.

:wq