In a bittersweet moment a week and a bit ago, I finally decommissioned mySGI R5K Indy. We got the machine in the summer of 1996, so it has beenprovided faithful, trouble-free service for just over ten years. That'simpressive longevity, especially for the hard drives.

It was a pretty good machine when new, basically the top of the line ofSGI's basic workstations; as a peon sysadmin, I was lucky to get it. Ispent several

The advantage of using vendor packages is that someone else worriesabout taking care of program , tracking upstream releases andbugfixes and security issues, making sure that it works, and (with adecent package management system) mostly handling upgrades from versionY to version Z.

This may seem petty, since after all it's easy enough to keep track ofsomething like Apache. The problem is that without vendor packages, it'snot just Apache; it's Apache and GNU Emacs and LaTeX and