On Monday 06 February 2012 17:14, Aaron W. Hsu conveyed the following
to alt.os.linux.slackware...
> Aragorn <str...@telenet.be.invalid> writes:
>
>> Slack isn't the only distro that tries to stay as close to UNIX as
>> possible. Gentoo and Arch Linux are also in that ballpark.
>
> When I last tried Gentoo, I can't say that working with it was
> anything close to working with the BSDs or any other UNIX with which I
> am familiar.
That is strange. Installing and updating Gentoo is all commandline-
driven, and Gentoo's Portage package management is based upon the BSD
Ports system.
The init system is of course different from that of BSD. It uses openrc
now, which is written in C and behaves very similarly to the traditional
System V init, but with named runlevels rather than numbered ones, and
dependency-based init scripts. It supports both parallel and
sequential runlevel initialization.
> Not to disparage Gentoo, far be it from me, but I wouldn't consider
> nearly as close to other UNIXen as Slackware.
Well, I beg to differ on that.
> Arch is a bit different though. I have heard great things about it,
> but I've not tried it heavily yet. I tried a fork of it for a special
> situation, but that failed miserably. It does seem to try for a good
> UNIX like perspective. I am a bit disconcerted by the rolling
> releases, partly because I've heard of people being bitten by this,
> and I've been bitten by rolling releases as well. It's a nice distro,
> but for stability and "comfort" (for my definition of comfort) I'd
> still give the edge to Slackware.
Both rolling upgrade releases and fixed upgrade releases have their pros
and cons. It's just another way of maintaining the system. And
sometimes, even fixed date releases break things, like a number of years
ago, when RedHat, Mandrake and several others suddenly went from RPM
version 3.x to version 4 during the distro's lifetime.