[Gllug] CentOS and RHES

[Martin A. Brooks]

Simon Morris wrote:
> In your opinion why is this? Simply the lack of people making packages
> or do Red Hat restrict the amount of software they are happy to provide
> through official channels?

In my opinion they cannot reasonably provide more than they do.  Debian 
has hundreds of package maintainers and thousands of contributors, all 
working for free,  none expecting any kind of reward other than kudos 
and respect from peers.

Debian has the infrastructure in place to accept contributions from all 
sources and then allow the package in to the official repositories on 
its own merits.  For sure you'll get broken stuff in experimental and 
unstable but by the time you get to testing and stable you can be damn 
sure that what you're using is already widely tested.

I imagine Redhat would love to have the same sort of QA and, as far as 
they go, I think their QA is one of the best out there but they lack the 
concept of developmental stages that enables debian's packages to prove 
themselves in the wild.  By the time you install a package you can be 
sure that hundreds if not thousands of other people have done so without 
problems.  Not just the same source, _the very same binary_. Also where 
this binary interacts with other parts of the system, it will also be 
_the very same binaries_; this is critical to ensuring the quality of a 
package.

Mart.




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