[Gllug] CentOS and RHES
Martin A. Brooks
martin at hinterlands.org
Tue Oct 25 19:16:46 UTC 2005
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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