Re: [Pan-users] Re: Re: Re: blank Action column

[eto]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 11:17:20PM +0000, walt wrote:

> <beer-induced-rant>
> Just as an aside, I still find debian-based linux distributions a royal
> pain the the backside to configure.  I give the ubuntu team a lot of
> credit for making it better than Debian itself -- but I am not the
> least bit tempted to switch away from gentoo for my real machine.
> 
> Just one tiny, self-indulgent example, if I may:  When I ran 'configure'
> in the pan source directory, the error message told me I didn't have
> 'gtk-2.0' installed on my machine.  Sure enough, I didn't, so I went
> looking for gtk in the list of available ubuntu/debian packages.
> 
> Well, it took me a good while to figure out that the 'gtk' development
> packages are named 'libgtk' rather than 'gtk'.  On gentoo, by way of
> comparison, the required package is named 'gtk'.  What a difference
> such a trivial thing makes!
> </beer-induced-rant>

I feel that after using Debian for a while these kinds of problems
go away.  The nice thing about Debian is the consistency.  Once you know
that all development packages are lib* you never need to learn it again.
The naming might even be in the Debian policies somewhere.

I had this same issue when compiling.  When I got that error, though, 
I did this from the same command line I was compiling at:

  apt-cache search gtk | grep 2 | grep dev


It took just a couple of seconds to find the right package.


Over time Debian will start making a lot of sense.  And it will make even
more sense over a _long_ period of time.  I, for example, am running
servers that I installed Debian on over 7 years ago and have never
"reinstalled" since.  I just keep upgrading and upgrading without issues.