OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[der Mouse]

> I ended up building from source which works fine and does what I need
> to do without all the extras that are required by a packaged system -
> but it means that there's no record on the system of any mplayer
> "package", so it'll be hard to know what to remove if it ever comes
> to it.

That's a problem only if you use no discipline when installing the
result.  Personally, for example, if I were to install xabc-0.9.4, the
source would be in /local/src/xabc, the installed binaries would be in
/local/.bin/xabc-0.9.4, and there would be symlinks from /local/bin
into /local/.bin/xabc-0.9.4, and similarly for /local/{man,lib,...}.
There would also be a file recording those symlinks, so they can be
removed easily - there's a program dedicated to the job of managing the
link farms.

If this sounds interesting, have a look at
ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/local/src/c-publish/, which contains
the program responsible for managing the link farms.  (The rest is just
convincing the various programs to install their stuff in the proper
places, which can sometimes be difficult; it's depressing the number of
packages that think they know better than you how you want them
installed.)

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