[Nottingham] Debian devotion [was: OE Reply Fixer]

[Robert Davies]

On Wednesday 05 March 2003 17:23, you wrote:
> Martin Garton wrote:
> >On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, .waffle wrote:
> >>I type "apt-get install xfree86" and it gets installed, no questions
> >> asked.
> >>
> >>Sure, Debian has many other redeeming features, but this is surely the
> >>greatest? Oh, and yeah, it's free, and maintained by geeks, not corporate
> >
> >apt-get used to be only for .deb based distributions, but its long since
> >been ported to rpm. I've been using it in redhat for well over a year.
>
> The difference with debian is that it is designed to be easily
> upgradable from major version to major version via apt/deb, and the

But that feature is something that there was problems with for ppl moving to 
Woody it was one of the issues that delayed Woody's release.

RedHat and SuSE both support updates via RPM, and it does work for ppl, with 
some caveats so long as they have followed the rules on installing software  
and used rpm database or installed in to /usr/local (or /opt which in 
practice will also be safe).

You'll be able to screw up a Debian system in similar ways, if you try hard 
enough, most likely fewer ppl are tempted, because there's fewer different 
sources of .deb, and installing using apt, is  easy.

As actually SuSE's online update, uses YaST and can be done on command line 
and in cron job, I don't think they can be that far away from being able to 
provide a text-mode software install command, which solves the dependencies 
without going into the ncurses(3) or Qt(3) User Interface.

> packages tend to be better quality as they are running through the
> Debian testing process rather then me having to take them from everyone
> and their dog.  The Debian apt repositories also have much, much more
> vendor-tested software then is typically availible for rpm dists.

Fine but waiting 2 years for unstable to become stable, and to get reasonably 
up to date software is not acceptable.  If you run unstable then you become 
part of the 'Debian testing process'.

My problem was, I needed a 'Fresh' release, packages that had been tested 
reasonably and passed from unstable, that would add new software, and major 
releases of things like Destkops, which don't impact underlying server code.

Rob