The evolution of Fedora Core Linux

[Net Llama!]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, A. Khattri wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Net Llama! wrote:
>
> > That seems odd to say the least.  I've done countless RH installations,
> > with speciic package selections, and its never taken me more than 5-10
> > minutes at the most.
>
> We're talking about going through the whole list of packages (i.e.
> hundreds of packages) and hand-selecting what we dont want... that's not a
> 5 minute job.

It is if you start off with just the basic package groups that you need,
and you are familiar with RH.

>
> > > The main problem being that the package selection tool (at least the last
> > > time I had to use it) does not check dependencies until *after* you click
> >
> > When was the last time you used it?
>
> Right now Im working on a contract project managing 23 RHEL4 servers...
>
> > The last time I had dependency hell was back in the RH-6.x days, and I'm
> > quite confident that i use RH products alot more than you do.
>
> I too was a long time RH user for years, since 1996 at least. Right now Im
> working on a contract project managing 23 RHEL4 servers...

Then you might want to better familiarize yourself with how RH does things
so that you're not spending an hour with package selection or getting
stuck in dependency hell.  Unless you've got some really off the wall
usage requirements, neither should be neccesary with RHEL4.

>
> > Now if i
> > had a penny for every Gentoo user out there who was reporting bizarro
> > instability because he enabled every optimization and USE flag in
> > existence, I'd be a very wealthy man.  They don't call them Gentoo Ricers
> > for nothing.
>
> Im sure there are some Gentoo folks who are nuts about their flags and
> optimization but the vast majority are pretty sensible folk who accept
> the (sensible) defaults. I would argue you get the few oddballs in *any*
> group of advocates.

My experience is that the majority are oddballs, and minority are
sensible.

>
> I picked Gentoo purely from a maintenance and package customization
> standpoint - Im not happy that RH decides for me what features *I* want in
> the packages I install. Granted, in most cases the defaults are more or
> less OK but if you want a few packages different, you can't do it in RH
> unless you build from source RPM or just use a tarball (and then you're
> stuck, in essence, maintaining the packages yourself which kinda defeats
> the purpose).
>
> You will note I wrote this post without making any insulting remarks about
> RedHat users - we're talking about RH products here not RH users. We can
> agree to disagree without those kind of remarks. Thanks.

Actually, i was talking about Gentoo as well.  If we want to discuss
package selection nightmares, GEntoo is the granddaddy of them all, with a
maze of packages, and no well engineered mechanism for someone
inexperienced to select them, and worse, spending hours waiting for the
multitude of interdependencies to get installed.


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