Re: mc in fedora 10

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

On Fri, 2009-11-13 at 09:49 -0500, MK wrote:

> Okay! Evidentally I didn't look hard enough.  But it was not then (and
>  I imagine is not now) part of the standard or "base" disto.  Which is
>  to say, I have an adulterated, direct from redhat, 2 DVD set right
>  here, (ie. an 8gb "base" repository) which is what you get when you
>  download "Fedora 10-64", and mc *is not* part of that.

The way modern distros work is different from what it used to look like
when bandwidth was expensive and Internet connections were slow. Five
years ago you could order, say 5 DVDs of Debian and essentially become
the holder of the cut of the complete Debian repo made at a certain
point in time.

Nowadays you are provided with a few DVDs which essentially serve as a
bootable media and contain just enough packages to get a minimal
self-sustainable working system on most of the hardware running + a free
collection of cherry-picked packages (based on the estimated install
base) from the base repository.

Once the system is installed you are expected to use its package
management facilities to pull anything else you might need from the
Internet. Essentially, past this point you are expected to forget about
the DVDs at all. E.g. for mc, which is part of the base package, you are
expected to run the following command:

sudo yum install mc

Or use a GUI, if you're after GUI. Few more seconds and you are done.
For third-party software, the packages for which are not maintained by
the distribution you have to install third-party repositories.

This is in fact much easier that rebuilding the package from sources
(and satisfying all of its dependencies manually along the road). 

Frankly, I can't understand how come people can't spend an hour to look
through the intro on how you are supposed to use a distribution to waste
days on recompiling packages from older source archives...
 
-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev