Reasons for choosing Fedora over Debian

[Piscium]

On 25 April 2011 15:15, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/25/2011 07:42 PM, Piscium wrote:
>>
>> Yours is a good point, and also the way I see things. So yes,
>> everything I use on a regular basis is available in the repos I have
>> currently enabled, plus a package or two in Atrpms. And there are also
>> two applications that I build from source, but they are very specific
>> and I think no distro has them yet (they are very simple to build
>> anyway, so not worthwhile to package).
>
> What would those two be? If they are simple to build, no reason not to
> package them.
>

I will mention just one of them, a Latin dictionary, created by
William Whitaker:
http://users.erols.com/whitaker/words.htm

When I started using Linux I used a tar ball with binaries provided by
a college teacher somewhere in the USA, but then I realized it had an
older version of the code and of the dictionaries. So I got the
dictionaries from the Windows zip file and built the source myself
from the website.

Interestingly it is written in Ada as the author worked for the
American military. I thought of packaging it myself but it is unlikely
I will do it anytime soon, so if anyone has an interest please go
ahead.

It is very simple to build. It comes with good build instructions and
one just calls gnatmake which does its magic. I did change one line of
code for a different configuration setting, but it is possible
alternatively to use a configuration file to the same effect.

And as it is not being developed anymore there is no work required on
new versions of for bug fixing. Mind you, I have yet to find a bug.