[Wylug-help] Distro wars 2

[Frank Shute]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 09:59:00AM +0000, Gary Stainburn wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 03 December 2002 9:46 pm, Nik Jewell wrote:
>
> > <snip>
>
>
> 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.

I was trying to keep it based on technical grounds but arguing with
somebody who hasn't used any other system to speak of is a waste of
time, so I'm giving up on that front. I can't for the life of me
understand why people get so upset when you make criticisms, justified
or otherwise, about their OS - they get so defensive you would think
that you were about to slaughter their child.

It seems that it's peculiar to the Linux world too, go to a FreeBSD or
Solaris group or list and people regularly criticise the system without
being called a troll.

>
> 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.

Well I know that is your opinion Gary & it surprises me that you
haven't poked your head up earlier in this thread to express it!

>
> 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.

I'd agree with all you said there.

>
> 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.

RPMS would probably be OK if there were more of them maintained
against the current release. There's a lot of software that's better
IMO then that which comes with a RH release, this is where you run
into problems in my experience.

But what if RedHat had a Debian apt or FreeBSD ports system in place?
You could more or less then keep your system identical to the
repository. How many fewer/easier support calls would RH have then
when all the systems are running software that's maintained against
the current release? Debians got 10000+ maintained packages/ports &
FreeBSD has got 7000+ on top of the core system, how many has RH got?:

$ ls -1 /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS | wc -l
 720

Admittedly that's a 6.1 CD but I don't know if there'd be that many
more at www.redhat.com

>
> 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.

This is probably OK for you, you probably just get away with the
limited choice of software that RH offer or you run the garbage given
to you like sendmail and bind ;)

>
> 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.

Don't you have to hack the Make/.config file in order to get it to
compile against older libraries (which it may or may not do), install
an older application or upgrade your libraries (rpm hell!)? I thought
the src.rpms had dependencies too.

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

I used to use tarballs because I found it easer than mucking around
with rpm dependencies and on a slow connection I didn't want to
download some rpm with a load of dependencies when I could be pretty
sure the source would compile against what I had.

>
> 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.

As long as you're happy thats OK - I'm not trying to say that everbody
who runs RH is a luser or something, if it works for you, use it. I've
just tried to point out some deficiencies IMO that RH has compared to
some other distros and OSes. Deficiencies that RH should really fix
pretty quickly before they get left behind - after all they've got a
pile of money haven't they? Debian hasn't nor has FreeBSD, why don't
they put such an infrastructure in place? Can anybody give any reasons
why they shouldn't?

John's answer that RH `has a responsibility to their customers that
FreeBSD hasn't' was so vague as to be meaningless.

>
> (puts on tin hat and gets under desk)

No need to - you made sensible points IMO.

Although `RedHat is perfect!!!!' is probably a slight exaggeration IMHO
;)

--

 Frank

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