[Wylug-help] Distro wars 2

[Gary Stainburn]

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 9:46 pm, Nik Jewell wrote:
> With all due respect to the parties involved in this long running
> discussion (under multiple headings), is there any chance that this could
> be continued off-list?
>
> I'm normally the first to argue that technical discussions be carried on
> on-list, such that useful searchable archives are created for the future.
>
> However, this conversation has become somewhat convoluted, and it is hard
> to trawl through the multiple levels of quotes to extract what may be
> usefully recorded for posterity.
>
> I don't mean to offend anybody....
>
> Nik
>

Hi Nik, all

I agree completely with you about the content of this tread. It's becoming
more an argument of opinions and not of technical merit.  It therefore is
ceasing to be of any interrest to anyone except the parties involved.

However, I thought I'd just add my opinion before we all call it a day(no
doubt this will actually just restart the same arguments).

1) Redhat is brillient!!!!
2) Redhat is perfect!!!!
3) Redhat invented the world
4) Everything else is inferior
5) Cos I said so it must be right.

There,feel better now.

Seriouly though, the argument for/against Redhat boils down to 2 basic topics

1) How good is the system - i.e. how complete, how stable out of the box,
what's broken or missing.
2) RPM - do you love it or hate it.

1) NEVER ever ever use a .0 release. This appears to be more relevent to 8.0
than it did to 7.0 and 6.0.  They seem to have changed and moved lots of
things which is causing big problems.  7.x->8.0 upgrades seem to be major
headaches, plus admining the box is different, with some of the config tools
chaning name, or even changing RPM package.

No doubt, as 8.1 comes out and people get used to the new config's 8.0 will
become better/easier.

I do agree with the general comment tho' that the .0 releases are not much
more than BETA versions, and I think that RH should put more effore into
testing releases before setting them forth.

2) From RH's point of view, RPMS age a godsend for maintainance and support.
Think about a MS product.  They release a product - Word97.  Everybody
running Word97 is running the *SAME* word97.  Rod hasn't compiled it with
more options in than Jane. Freddy isn't trying to use syntax highlighting
when it's been disabiled at build time by Bungle.

If they receive a support call, they know exactly what the config is, where
the DLL's are etc.

By using RPMs RH manage to get some way towards this.  On an admin side of
things, I love RPM's.  I have a number of RH boxes spread over two sites, and
by using an in-house version of up2date I can keep them all up to the latest
versions quite easily.  All I have to do manually is confirm that I want the
updates applying.  This is obviously important for my internet facing boxes.

I personally have not seen the 'RPM hell'  since RH4 and early RH5 days.
However, if you ever get into the :

This RPM needs that library
That library needs that RPM
and This RPM doesn't like that RPM

then why not simply use .src.rpm instead and rebuild the binary RPM on your
box.  This will then (usually) rebuild 'This RPM' so that it will use the
libraries you have on your box.

It is a VERY long time since I've had to use tarballs to install anything.

Before Frank shoots be down I want to state that I am NOT saying RH is better
than anything else because:

1) I have never used SUSE
2) I have never used Debian
3) I have used Mandrake but not to any great extent
4) I have never used IRIX (I've used AIX and I hate it)

However, there is a very good reason why I have never used any of the other
distributions. I've never found the need to.

(puts on tin hat and gets under desk)

Gary


[bloody big snip]
--
Gary Stainburn

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