Howdy, > Maybe this would be an option if you can show that all the work in > making really good RPMs for Mandrake would not be lost. Maybe if you > give us a Mandrake kernel built with dpkg or whatever it you use to make > debs (rules?), with all the patches and all the rpm build-time options > working, and tell us how long it took, we could estimate how long it > would take to migrate the other +-2000 RPMs.
Yes, it wouldn't be easy if you moved every single Mandrake package over. It'd be much easier to move only the stuff that was specific to Mandrake, and kept woody/unstable for the rest of the fork. Honestly Mandrake would gain packages by doing this - Debian GNU/Linux consists of over 9,000[*] packages. That's a lot more than 2000 no matter how you count it. :-) > I wouldn't mind trying apt out, but all that requires is that someone > update the sources lists. Converting to deb does not sound feasible, and > (besides packaging quality - which Mandrake would have to take over if > there were a fork), the only advantage is supposedly apt. Apt-get is a pretty major addition, especially if you add in debconf, and so forth that apt-get works with. Apt-get, and the promise of never ever reinstalling a system to upgrade it, is a pretty strong idea. Converting (using alien) is more of a legacy protection tool rather than a method of moving gaim.rpm to gaim.deb when there already *is* an gaim.deb. IMO, such a fork would start at the moment every system tool of Mandrake was ported. > > That's the beauty of "Mandrake Debian." I'm not suggesting that > > Mandrake become Debian, on the contrary, I'm suggesting moving things > > like Mandrake's excellent installer and provide a better system. > > What exactly is better then? See above. It certainly isn't their installer. ;-) > Except a few more things are broken, mozilla is in danger of being > dropped etc. What? I can't seem to spot these broken packages (and every distro has broken packages, for that matter). BTW, moz is alive and well over in Debian, 0.9.8 became available the other day infact. > It's been shown that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. urpmi > (and even rpmdrake) are VERY fast with synthesis! Mandrake already has Apt-get is at least as fast, if not faster. > solid CLI tools (maybe you don't have a need for them, otherwise you > would have seen them?). The only tool that is applicaable to a CLI > environment that doesn't run there is diskdrake (AFAIK). Hmm... I could never find the CLI tools in Mandrake (probably my fault). How do you get to them? I missed them after leaving SuSE and the comfort of YaST. > It was obviously hard enough for them to not consider releasing a third > version. Uh, I think that had more to do with politics and a Microsoft investment that sang the toon of "do what we want if you want this money that will keep you afloat." > Show me one company that has made a success of a commercial > Debian release over at least 3 years, and it might be an option. How There aren't any, because no one except Corel and Stormix have even really tried. Of those only Corel had a distribution network like Mandrake and RedHat. It's also not fair to blame Corel's failures on Debian, after all their release was woefully outdated, had a heavily modified version of KDE 1, and so forth. Corel killed Corel Linux, IMO. > many commercial distributions are there based on rpm/RedHat that have > been going for 3 years? Quite a few. That's really an unfair comparison. RPM and RedHat came before apt-get (and I believe [?] Debian). How many CUPS-based distros have been going for 3 years? None. Does that mean Mandrake shouldn't use CUPS for printing? > Mandrake it not broken. Why does it need to be fixed? It only needs to > keep improving at the current rate! Well, obviously my suggestion was a bit dramatic, but most people that know both systems know that dpkg is better than RPM. Just because RPM is the status quo, doesn't mean it's the best way to go in the future. -Tim -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy R. Butler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Universal Networks http://www.uninet.info Christian Portal and Search Tool: http://www.faithtree.com Open Source Migration Guide: http://www.ofb.biz ============= "Christian Web Services Since 1996" ==============
