On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 10:34 AM, Andrew Perrin wrote:
Not that I want to start a distro war, but what's wrong with Debian?
I need to tread carefully here because some people can be very sensitive about their favorite distributions.
Debian does not yet have a facility as robust as kickstart for deploying large numbers of similarly configured machines.
Many people prefer the RPM package management system to Debian's system. Some of the tools that are available for RPM (like yum) are every bit as good as the much heralded apt-get.
Having a distro flavored more like Red Hat will make it easier to get proprietary applications (like Oracle) to run. Though of course they likely wouldn't be officially supported (at least not until the distro built up enough critical mass to leverage their consumer buying power)
Many of us have been using Red Hat Linux or Mandrake and have built a set of tools that is geared towards automating the deployment and maintenance of large numbers of such systems. Adapting this model to work with Debian would require a complete retooling. Forking Red Hat and/or Mandrake would make it that much easier to continue to use our site-specific tool kits.
And, finally, Debian is just very rough around the edges. The installer is quite difficult and non-linear. Simple command line tools to make complex changes to the system don't seem to be there (who wants to muck with PAM settings to authenticate against LDAP & Kerberos when you can just run authconfig and check off a couple of menu options?). Debian is a very important distro but there is a large cross section of the Linux community that it does not appeal to for these reasons and more.
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