[Gllug] Dazed and confused

[Bruce Richardson]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 07:34:50PM +0100, William Palfreman wrote:
> Personally, Debian pisses me off.  All that "Software in the public
> interest" stuff is just so cloying and icky.

Oh, dear, evil old free software.  FWIW, Red Hat have always been fairly
forthright on that issue themselves.

> Also, the stable version is incredibly out of date.

Which is what security.debian.org is for.  It is included in the default
sources.list, for you to uncomment if you want.

> Its all very well when you on some kind of
> broadband, but on a modem downloading all those updates is mental.

I manage.  Most weeks there are no updates, some there are one or two,
every so often there are a dozen or so.  You can always find out what
needs updating before you do anything and can choose what to upgrade
when.

And downloading updates is just as necessary with RH, so I don't see the
logic behind your objections.  The difference with vanilla RH is that
you have to go hunting for the updates yourself (other rpm-based distros
are developing their own equivalents of apt or just porting apt).

> I don't want something to be so out of date I can't use any of the
> supplied packages for fear of security holes, and I don't want to be
> bleeding edge either as that brings its own problems.

So stable with updates should be good for you.

> I mean, what's with all those debian patches anyway?

They're just like the Red Hat patches (or did you think every
application was written for RH?)  They impose a consistent set of
configuration choices across the distribution.  Given that the source of
most apps is written to be adaptable to however the host system is
organised, this is necessary to create a stable and coherent system.

Debian source packages always provide the original upstream source plus
the patches necessary to change it into a Debianised package.  This
allows you go to the original source and make changes there or to choose
how Debianised you want a package to be.

> Having run RH at work on piles and piles of
> machines, I find it much easier to use and secure what I know rather than
> learn all that apt-get malarkey.   

Ignorance may be bliss but it isn't security.  Which isn't to say that
RH can't be secured but the fact that you don't know how to use system X
is not in itself a positive argument for using system Y.

-- 
Bruce

If the universe were simple enough to be understood, we would be too
simple to understand it.
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