Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I've developed on both, and find the redhat ones to be much, much worse. Perhaps its a different development area, I do mostly Ruby and other dynamic languages. The -dev is a PITA when I want to install the mysql ruby gem, but I can't because it can't find the headers, so I have to go hunt down if I want mysql-client-dev, mysql-devel, or something else. With Arch, if I have mysql installed, I have the headers. Done.

I find the 1 3rd party repo to be a far better situation. I've never even needed it, everything is in the main pacman repos, or AUR. If I need the latest git, I have to decide if I need Dag, or EPEL, or some other one. And compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs the nightmare that is rpmbuild. I don't have any experience building .deb, so I can't comment on that.

Then you install packages the wrong way.

IE, yum install mysql* ruby* gem* will get you everything

> And compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs the nightmare that is rpmbuild.

Now you're just trolling.

"when I want to install the mysql ruby gem, but I can't because it can't find the headers, so I have to go hunt down if I want mysql-client-dev, mysql-devel, or something else."

While I'm sympathetic to your issues with RH (I recently left it - again) what you describe there is ridiculous.

  yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel

.. that's it. Now if you'd complained about the version of mysql that installed then I would heartily endorse your criticism but c'mon - there is nothing wrong with the above command.

And having to remember weird flags for pacman ("-Syu" to update? wtf?) is far worse. In fact, when I saw that it pretty much made me lose interest in playing with Arch at all. I love unix but pointless arcanity is stupid and user-hostile. "yum update" (or "apt-get upgrade") are much easier to remember, with no loss in functionality, and seeing complexity for complexity's sake like that in Arch is a bad sign to me.

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