2011-06-25 Further setup work on the server. It was obvious that I would install the heirloom tools. First I installed ex-vi into /usr/local/bin, thus being first in PATH. I am convinced that if one calls `vi' he should get a real `vi' and not `vim'. Next came ed because heirloom ed is much more usable than other eds. I installed it to /bin/ed, after removing GNU ed. These editors are just for convenience. Real important are the doctools. For those lex and yacc, from the devtools, are re- quired. I only installed those two devtools. Then the doctools (everything except mpm, which is C++). Everything went to /usr/local. As I have two nroffs, which behave differently, on the system I ran into trouble with man(1). I solved it by adjusting /etc/manpath.config: DEFINE nroff /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc I augmented the doctools makefiles by uninstall targets to be able to remove the files again. This job was a bit tedious. Prob- ably I should propose a patch to Gunnar Ritter in order to save others from having to do the work again. Let's see if I find the time. Having different versions of the same program installed needs management. Debian's approach to this handle this situation is /etc/alternatives. Nice from the package-management's POV but a huge overhead from a do-it-yourself user's POV. It turned out to be just another of these abstraction layers that I don't like in Debian. Really, the feeling grows that I want to run away from Debian because of IMO bad technical solutions. The package management system is one, or maybe *the*, central component of an operating system distribution. Debian's package system is very elaborate. But, sadly it turns out that many technical decisions are focused too much on the package system itself. Complexity (in form of abstraction layers!) gets intro- duced in order to make it easier for the package system. Symlinks are the favored weapon for everything. This hinders an adminis- trator, who is familiar with Unix, doing directly what he wants to do. Instead he needs (or at least should, because you can't be sure what will happen if you don't) to use administation tools. We all know about Suse's yast, Webmin, and of course Window's re- gistry. This isn't the Unix way. But it's one example why the goal to be ``The universal operating system'' must fail: The more it becomes usable for non-technical users the more it'll become unattractive for the technically advanced users. Although I had hard times with Crux's ``do-it-yourself'' approach in the beginning, I more and more begin to appreciate it. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke