[Wylug-help] Distro wars 2

[John Hodrien]

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Frank Shute wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 11:08:03AM +0000, John Hodrien wrote:
>
> > FreeBSD may steal your wife and your job.  At least I've used RedHat
> > for a fair few years.  I don't remember claiming to be a RedHat know
> > it all either, never mind repeatedly saying that.
>
> You've consistently maintained a defensive wall around RH, but now you
> say you don't know that much about RH. It's already been established
> that you don't know much about other distros or OSes either. Yet you
> choose to argue from a state of ignorance.

This is boring, you're just insulting me with no grounds.

> > Yes, but you should be able to use your experience to see the problem from
> > other people's angles.
>
> What you really mean is: `see it from my jaundiced perspective'.

Whatever.

> > Always?  There really aren't that many RPMS we've installed on top of the base
> > RedHat system here.
>
> Admission of guilt. You're running bugfest sendmail & probably some
> shit-stricken desktop environment.

No I don't run sendmail.  And again, insulting my choice of environment really
strengthens your case.

> > But RedHat has a responsibility to its customers that FreeBSD doesn't.
> > Distributed CVS would not be appropriate IMHO.
>
> What's this responsibility to their customers you talk about? To
> continually push out a broken system? I'm not bothered what system
> they choose to distribute their software by, just dump rpm & maintain
> a sensible number of packages to work with the new system.

I don't believe it's the existence of RPM that causes the problems.  IRIX has
a /similar/ package setup from what I've seen, it's certainly nowhere near
ports.  They seem to manage.

> > No, don't see above.  These tools can update your system to what RedHat have
> > pre-approved.  Isn't that what you're trying to say is hard?
>
> And RedHat haven't even pre-approved a sensible MTA.

Is postfix that broken?  I agree I'm not a fan, but...

> > Must have imagined my XP installation being such a pain in the arse I ditched
> > it.
>
> So you don't know anything about XP maintenance either, but you'll play safe
> and say that RH is easier to maintain anyway.

You misunderstood.  I did not mean I found the process of installing XP a pain
in the arse, I mean the existence of an installed XP on my machine was the
pain.  So quit poking holes in my experience.

> > No.  I'm not burying anything.  RedHat is good.  I've not said it's flawless,
> > far from it, and I can give arguments as to what I think is wrong with it, but
> > I just don't think you've attacked RedHat from the right angle.  I've only
> > become a full-time RedHat user with 8.0, I'm fairly vendor-agnostic.  But I
> > see commercial offerings like IRIX and I think RedHat haven't got it *sooo*
> > wrong.
>
> IRIX is a very different horse for a very different course. Try installing
> RedHat on your 128 proc box.

Or try installing IRIX on a 2 processor box.  I don't get it.  Just because
the kernel scales, I don't see why that makes the OS a completely different
kettle.  There's plenty of features that you can compare, it's not eggs and
cheese.

> > Saying that dpkg is better because of its more flexible dependency setup is
> > fair.  Saying that RedHat is worse because it doesn't ship with apt-get as
> > standard is fair.  Saying that they shouldn't ship package x because it's
> > unstable and insecure is fair.
>
> So after complaining about slander and how good RPM is you finally
> acknowledge that their system is just a little bit wanting. Bizarre.

No, you've just missed the point the whole way along.  I'm all in favour of
criticism of computing technology, but there's nothing constructive about
'RedHat, that sucks', which is where you've been most of the time.  I was
[initially] trying to coax you into commenting on some interesting issues.

jh

--
"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty,
 you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to
 yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough
 immortality for me."                                 -- Edsgar Wybe Dijkstra