Re: cvs mirroring

Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 14:05:51 -0700 From: Darryl Okahata <darrylo(a)sr.hp.com&gt; It's not a joke. I don't normally do Linux (I use FreeBSD), but I'll take a stab at doing a Linux port of CVSup, as it's pretty nice. However, I know nothing about Linux, except that there're lots of different variants, and so I'd like some recommendations on which distribution to get. Link statically and it doesn't matter. Dynamic linking/loading is evil anyway :-) I like the Slackware distribution because you can do a very lean installation, but it still comes with a lot of stuff if you want to do a more complete installation. For a *long* time, I ran a Slackware distribution with X11, Emacs, XEmacs and CMUCL on 150Mb of disk (which included about 12Mb set aside for swap). I tried out RedHat, but a lot of the details kind of turned me off so I went back to Slackware. The kernel version sometimes matters, but usually only for bleeding-edge hardware support. If you want to use your parallel port Sparq drive without adding your own kernel module, you need to be on 2.0.35 or better. If you're doing normal software development, it really doesn't even matter which kernel you're using. BTW, I don't think that whoever built the 20.4 Linux release built the tools statically. If I'm remembering correctly, this took extra effort when I did it, just specifying a static built only affects the XEmacs executable. As it stands now, when I install XEmacs 20.4 on Slackware 3.5 (Linux 2.0.34 kernel), I have to play some games (lying about dynamic library version numbers through symbolic linking) to get etags to work. Really, really, really, distributed executables should be built statically, especially for Linux. Rick