[Gllug] Debian or Fedora

[Bruce Richardson]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 12:13:27PM +0000, Ian wrote:
> until very recent incantations of rpm systems, and the limited help of stuff
> like urpmi or apt-rpm i have always found there is too much manual donkey work
> associated with installing binary rpms. debian's pool and distro system really
> does have the right idea, if fedora uses debs then there is hope for them yet.

Fedora works quite well with both apt-rpm and yum.  You would probably
be pleasantly surprised if you looked.  What apt-rpm and yum can't do is
fix the poor quality of many of the packages.  I expect the much greater
user involvement in Fedora to improve this. 

I used to be an active member of the Red Hat user lists and they were a
great community.  Unfortunately, Red Hat paid no attention to the
community at that point.  There were problems with the build quality of
many of the core packages but ordinary users found it impossible to get
any feedback on their suggestions for improvements.  With very few
exceptions, none of these suggestions were acted on.  It was maddening
to see a successful distribution ignoring a valuable resource in this
way, to the detriment of the distributions's quality.

But then the users couldn't even get feedback when they complained that
the list archives were broken (a situation that lasted nearly two years,
iirc).  When RH did finally appoint a list admin to deal with users, he
spent most of his time flaming newbies.  Then the mailing list software
broke altogether and it was several months before RH even acknowledged
the problem and employed an external consultant to fix it.

I really hope the Fedora team get it right, this time.  Given the size
and enthusiasm of the user base, they could do great things if they're
allowed to.

-- 
Bruce

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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