Free is too expensive (Economist) [LWN.net]

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 0:54 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by khim
Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)

> Distributions basically impose “it's my way or the highway”: you can pick from the given selection of goods but the assortment is centrally planned and provided.

This used to be a source of frustration for me, until I switched to Arch Linux. This is for two reasons:

It is quite easy to develop package build scripts;
It has a semi-official repository of user-contributed package build scripts.

As a consequence, it's much easier to use software that's not in the distribution. It's even possible to replace major infrastructure components (like installing the latest Git snapshot of Mesa with the experimental i915g driver), which would be a major hassle on dpkg/rpm-based distributions.

(Log in to post comments)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:27 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Having RPM spec files available for such stuff would be easy (for Fedora) and many source packages include the build machinery for Debian, but nobody has stepped up do organize "third party" repositories of said stuff. I did rebuild some packages for new versions (or local configurations) on Fedora and CentOS semi-routinely, but the need diminished over time due to better integration and more agressive upstream tracking.

Perhaps the non-existence of such repositories for other distributions is due to their users not indulging in routine wholesale recompilation, prefering a uniform, vetted set of packages instead...