[plug] RE: plug RedHat 5.1

[Gavin Tweedie]

News just in..
<snip>
   As expected, shareholders of Digital Equipment approved the
   acquisition of the company by Compaq Computer at a special meeting
   this morning in Westford, Massachusetts.
.....
   Compaq will pay about $4.5 billion in cash and issue 141 million
   shares of stock to cover the transaction. Digital shareholders will
   receive $30 in cash and .945 shares of Compaq stock for each share of
   Digital stock. Overall, the deal will cost close to $9 billion.
</snip>
Get the full article at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,23055,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh
There goes meeting at DEC/digital, will be compaq by the looks now..

Now back to what I was going to comment on.

> > > IMHO, if a package has a priority (i.e. required, important, standard,
> > > optional) and clear dependencies, that is all the newbie needs to know.
> > > I don't know of a system that gives more, anyway.
> > Cetainly there are (well, I expect there are) dependencies. However, those
> > don't help a novice whether the package is useful.
> Mixed with priorities, they are more than enough.
> Install everything marked "important" or higher, install whatever things
> in "standard" you aren't sure you won't need, resolve the dependencies in
> such a way that the first rule still holds.

This my friends is where the LSB comes in. Most of you will know what the
Linux Standard Base is, but for tose who dont...Its basically a collection
of packages which will be satandard for all distros, so whether you have
RH/caldera/suse/slackware/debian they will all have the same _base_
packages, anything else can be chosen by the distro, its mainly designed
to make programs run on all distros will no problems.

There has been a lot of talk about LSB, in particular at linuxexpo 98, a
few distros have signed up, from my head it included suse, mklinux,
slackware and caldera. Redhat has not yet joined, many believe they will
once it has been finalised.
 
Dont have a URL for it atm, can find one for anyone whos interested.

Gavin