Chris Hedemark wrote:
Why do we have KDE and Gnome? Why not just one good desktop?
Choice is a good thing. Red Hat users have at least two good choices. apt-rpm is probably better for some environments, up2date/rhn for others.
For example, with up2date/rhn I can set up groupings of servers inside of a web interface, and apply errata or install new packages on entire groups of servers at once (and even schedule the updates to happen at night if I want). apt-rpm doesn't provide a good way to do this, and rhn is actually pretty good at this.
But rhn/up2date are redhat specific. I can't manage my Solaris boxen, Mandrake, OpenBSD, etc. Even though the client might be GPL'ed, the tool itself is in effect proprietary in that it does me no good whatsoever on any other flavor of Linux let alone other UNIX OS's. Of course that would threaten RH's business model so I don't expect that they will ever fix that (and I don't blame them for doing it that way to be honest). I think ultimately the community needs to solve this problem.
I'd like to plug locally grown Yum: http://www.dulug.duke.edu/yum/. It runs nightly as well as when called upon, and since you run your own yum server, you decide when to push updates. It resolves package dependencies, and has ignore lists etc. It's fast, and easy to set up. Heck you can even upgrade between major versions: change your repositories, run yum update, and presto, your 7.3 distro is now 8.0. Reboot and you're done.
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