Debian et al: was re: Mandriva

[Net Llama!]

On 05/14/2005 09:26 AM, Collins Richey wrote:
> Also, the RPM hell of years ago (pure RPM distros) is pretty much gone
> with yum or the apt for rpm stuff. I hear that the apt for RPM stuff
> is poorly maintained. I haven't had to chase a dependancy (I've had to
> chase a few packages) since I put up CentOS. The question is still
> outstanding whether I will be able to upgrade from CentOS4 to CentOS5
> in a few years. The way in which RedRat screws around with things in
> Fedora makes me doubt it. Also RedRat has a habit of choosing not to
> support things that are a standard elsewhere - xfs and other

Fedora supports all the popular filesystems, including XFS & JFS.

> filesystems, other important kernel functionality, and xfce are good

xfce is part of FC3, and will be in the 'fedora extras' of FC4.

> examples. CentOS is making available a plus repository (and of course
> there's Dag), but the RedRat (CentOS) base is a bit slim for my
> tastes.
> 
> OTOH, RedRat is ideal for engineering users such as I support. All
> they need is a stable C toolchain for developing embedded code. Some
> of them never run outside of Init Level 3. None of them care about the
> latest KDE or GNOME. We're looking at RHEL3 or 4, when problems with
> OpenLDAP are resolved, but most users are still RH9 and reporting no
> problems.
> 
> Like most large corporations, my employer is a firm believer in
> licenses (someone to kick around) with large suppliers, RedRat in this
> case. They wouldn't touch Debian or CentOS on a bet even though they
> never use the RedRat support that they pay for. They also pay (through

Good or bad, Redhat provides excellent support to its large customers. 
I spent a chunk of this past week watching RH get kicked around by two 
of its large customers (ache-pee & themequirks).

> the nose) for ClearCase and SlickEdit. That's not going to change.
> Even the choice of server hardware is based on less than logical
> decisions. Someone higher up in the food chain doesn't like how the
> Dell rack mount cases open, so rumor is we'll be switching to HP!

Ugh, i'm sorry.  HP servers have the worst RAID controllers ever. 
Slowest IO i've ever seen.

> 
> The one thing no one can match (gentoo is trying) is the massive
> number of packages available with Debian.

That's very deceptive, since the Debian package maintanence culture is 
so drastically different than any other distro.  All Debian packages are 
always under the big Debian umbrella, where as there are RH/FC RPMs 
floating around everywhere.

> 
> As a final gripe. I have not bothered to join any Debian mailing
> lists, but I've heard from others that they have a positive aversion
> to newbies, and  that gets my dander up. Also, Debian being more
> popular than some distros, I'm sure the traffic volume is higher than
> I would prefer.

I've not heard that explicitly, but it wouldn't surprise me.

The past couple weeks have been an eye opening experience.  Its been so 
many years since i've done the distro taste-test.  All its done is 
further reinforced my prefernce for RH.


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand		 		http://netllama.linux-sxs.org

  12:25:01 up 32 days, 22:38,  1 user,  load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00