[sclug] Gave up on Gentoo

[Alex Butcher]

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Simon Huggins wrote:

> But yeah, ask some of the Redhat/Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, Slackware or
> Gentoo crowd why they don't run it.  I imagine some of the responses
> you'll get for Debian will be "it's old software" because Debian itself
> is well overdue a release.  Ubuntu doesn't have that problem though.

As a RH user since 1995:

- stable is too stale, testing is too unsupported, and unstable is too scary

- RH has more traction in the workplaces I've been, so I only need to know
   one distro, along with Windows and Solaris to cover all the significant
   bases.

- the signing of Debian packages isn't as consistent as Red Hat/Fedora's.

- erratic handling of security updates (e.g. IIRC, in *stable*, an Apache
   fix broke some webmail package, and it didn't get fixed for a number of
   months - that could well be a showstopper in a consultancy situation; who
   pays for the remedial work - either migrating to a new, working, webmail
   package, or fixing up the original one?).

- hard for non-Debian developers to understand the release/support schedule.
   RHEL offers end-of-life dates for updates. Debian does too, but
   only until <time of next release> + <period>. That's hard to plan around
   in an enterprise environment.

- I'm used to RH, and all its quirks, now. :-)

On Debian's advantages:

+ massive package repository, and all packages considered part of the
   distro, so they generally all work together. The reason apt works so well
   is because the packages are well made - not because apt is a particularly
   clever bit of software.

+ will always be Free, no ifs, no buts.

For the last reason, Debian has had more of my money than RH, even though I
don't use Debian. It's my backup plan.

> Simon.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>