-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, Rich Payne hath spake thusly: > RedHat user, both have their advatages and disadvantages and one of the > advantages of Debian is that the packaging system is a little bit ahead of > RedHat (nothing that can't be fixed with apt-rpm so I hear).
I think that each package system has advantages over the other. For example, I find rpm (in general) easier to use than debian's package manager, in part because there's a single interface that does everything you can do with it (the rpm command). By comparison, debian has a number of different utilities, and I've found that for a beginner, figuring out which one you need is not that easy. There are others too, but I don't care to take the time to go into them, as that's not the point. Personally, I think a new packaging system that combines the best features of the two would be great. The trouble is that this *is* a religious war, and getting the two camps to come together is just as impossible as getting the Palestinians and the Israelis to come together. Missing from both right now, I think, is the ability to say that a particular package is recommended, but not required (does dpkg do this?) -- IOW if I want gnome but don't have a sound card, then esound isn't going to do me a damn bit of good... Installation shouldn't fail due to a missing recommended package. It should be reported on stdout/err though... Also, an advantage that debian has over Red Hat is that the debian project maintains a repository of packages for virtually every piece of software that runs on Linux. This is a quite impressive feat, and Red Hat would do well to copy it. It's not likely that they will though, because they're a company who pays their developers, as opposed to debian which is just a loose conglomeration of volunteer techie types that want to use great software. Due to limited resources, and the time constraints inherent in keeping to a product release schedule, Red Hat has had/will have a very hard time duplicating debian's package base. The problem is worse when you consider all the other vendors who use RPM... often RPMs for one system won't work on another (though often they will). So essentially each vendor needs to maintain their own package repository. This is a lot of duplication of effort, and is pretty wasteful for the Linux industry. It's downright anti-Linux, if you ask me... This is where I am in support of (at least the idea of) UnitedLinux. Packages built for distros that use it as their core will work on all of the other distros that use it too... This will make it much, much easier for the other vendors to maintain a cache of all the myriad of software packages that run on Linux systems. And I for one think that's a good thing. Everyone is quick to poop on the idea, but I think as long as the vendors don't misbehave, it's really a very positive thing for Linux. And, so far, IMO all of the press and bad word of mouth that the project has received has been from people who have misunderstood what Ransome Love has said. From what I've seen, contrary to popular belief, nothing about their proposed business model violates the GPL, as far as I can tell. What Ransome *has* been saying is that they obviously prefer that people pay them for using the software they put together, and they're doing everything they can *within their rights under the GPL* to try to ensure that you do so. Some felt that Ransome was saying that UnitedLinux would require a per-seat license for their software. And then rms came out and bashed UnitedLinux for this policy. However, Suse (probably the largest vendor involved with UnitedLinux) has already said that they haven't put forth such a policy, and they don't ever intend to. - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9IyRgdjdlQoHP510RAvzXAKCSTTt+f6LhxTrnx7H/mmDshhi8OwCfeXWr 1OIB3NAK71K8PMY9gKhn/50= =CEQB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
