On Sun Feb 24, 2002 at 01:37:13PM -0600, Timothy R. Butler wrote: I think this is an absolutely lunatic discussion but here goes my main points:
1) Can you even begin to comprehend the amount of work this would be? You obviously have no idea as to the amount of work involved in this... the way Debian is configured is much different than Mandrake. Menus and package names are one thing, how we configure apache or other apps is very different from Debian. The patches we use (for a reason) are often different from Debian. Trying to take a woody base and apply all of our modifications to it is insane. 2) Why switch to .deb packages when we will have to switch back to .rpm anyways to be LSB compliant? That's right folks... LSB has (or very likely will) picked RPM as the package format that determines one factor of how LSB-compliant a distribution is. To that end, if Debian wants to be LSB-compliant, they will need to support RPM packages. It would be a waste of time to switch to .deb then back to .rpm. > > 1?/ mdk aims to be ... reh hat compatible. > > Althought they are diverging from that goal in recent years. Most RedHat > apps still work on Mandrake, but most RedHat apps also work in Debian (yup, > you heard correctly). > > >they took ideas from debian > > because they were interesting. > > Most commercial apps and commercials offers are for ... Red hat ( did > > you see deb packages on nvidia site for their drivers ? ) > > debian does not have great commercial support contrary to Red Hat > > True. However, that is simply because no one has taken to the task of > supporting Debian yet. There is always the need for somebody to be the first > to take the plunge and move to something new and different. HP seems to be very friendly with Debian. Let them try to make their own Debian-based distribution. Maybe they'll be the first that succeeds. > > 2?/ another pb is debian development cycle. mdk is a distro that aims to > > provide cutting edge packages. So if they want to do the same thing with > > debian, they will have to rely on testing ( or maybe unstable ) what's > > is not a very good thing. However cooker is a mix of unstable/testing > > philosophy but msksoft control the progress. If they rely on debian at a > > moment they will have to fork before releasing the distro and after come > > back. This mean work to backport patchs and other things from this > > branch to the common one > > I'm not suggesting keeping it integrated with Debian. Just like the > current MDK development platform is a fork from an old version of RedHat, > Mandrake Debian could fork Debian "unstable" or "woody," and then never > return. IMO, Mandrake would then be able to take apt-get and use it to it's > advantage. Cooker would be just like unstable in Debian, and then users could > also choose stable (i.e. MDK 8.1) or unstable (i.e. MDK 8.2 Beta). > If Mandrake didn't purposely change the way the system worked too much, > things like dpkg and apt-get upgrades could be easily integrated into the > forked system, much like new versions of RPM are integrated into MDK today. So your only real issue is with apt-get and dpkg? My God man! You want us to make a *huge* change in the way things are done simply so that we can use two tools?!? Doesn't that seem a little... well... silly? > > 3?/ Will debian users/developers will be agree ? > > I dunno. I think they were fine with Corel, Progeny, and Stormix. I see no > reason why they wouldn't be okay with Mandrake using Debian as a basis. Nice examples. You want to rank "Mandrake Debian" with Corel (defunct), Progeny (dead), and Stormix (bankrupt)? You gotta admit... commercial Debian-based distributions have shit for a track record. I wouldn't want to try down that road. Now, RPM-based distributions seem to be doing quite nicely. Why change? Red Hat's doing good... SuSE's doing good... heck, even TurboLinux is still in business.... all using RPMs. All the new guys? Using RPMs. All the guys who decided to use .deb? Non-commercial (Debian) or dead (Corel/Stormix/Progeny). (Are you secretly trying to take Mandrake down?) ... (just kidding) -- MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/ "lynx -source http://www.freezer-burn.org/bios/vdanen.gpg | gpg --import" 1024D/FE6F2AFD 88D8 0D23 8D4B 3407 5BD7 66F9 2043 D0E5 FE6F 2AFD Current Linux kernel 2.4.8-34.1mdk uptime: 35 days 3 hours 13 minutes.
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