>>>>> "David" == David Mandel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
David> Debian for certain clients. It is big, but philosophically pure.
David> Thus, I prefer it for LinuxFund.org, PLUG,
David> ltplus.org, and other OpenSource organizations.
David> I also recommend Debian to hackers and other
David> philosophically pure power users.
David> It can be a pain to install. On the other hand,
David> Debian doesn't hide configuration files with
David> "user friendly" tools, so Debian system
David> administrators know what files are getting changed.
Well, I think the installation is improved... I just spent the last
month at work on that. It's not a fancy GUI, but it does the job
fairly well. If you use either the `compact' or `idepci' flavor, and
install over the network, you'll only need three floppies to get it
running. It still need a lot of improvement though. There are many
known problems.
David> On the down side, it uses .debs instead of .rpms
David> for package management. Altho .debs work fine,
David> they aren't as universially accepted .rpms.
David> However, this is only a minor inconvenence.
It's been argued that when several divergent Linux distributions are
using the .rpm format, you can have problems where if you install
libXXX from distribution A, then try to install software that depends
on libXXX but is built and distributed by distribution B, that
softare won't work right because of differences in the builds of the
libraries... sonames can differ, &c. If you use .deb's, you know
everything will match. I'm told that `dpkg' has better dependancy
handling than `rpm' does also, though I'm not capable of
understanding the source to those just yet... (maybe I am; I won't
know until I actually try.) I like that Debian's `conffiles' are all
out in a directory where I can get at them, not stowed away in a
database.
