[plug] RE: plug RedHat 5.1

[John Summerfield]

On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, The Thought Assassin wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, John Summerfield wrote:

I chose "sed" as an specific package to illustrate a general point.
Doubtless had I spent the time viewing my RH5.1 CD I'd have found better
examples.  (However, findimg them becomes harder as I learn more of the
Unix world.) 

My first distribution was actually Slackware (2.0 I think, came attached
to "Running Linux") and that's when I was most confused.

> > On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > > On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, John Summerfield wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > > > > IMHO, if a package has a priority (i.e. required, important, standard,
> > > > > optional) and clear dependencies, that is all the newbie needs to know.
> > Choices aren't always so easy: one of my first installs was to a 486DX33,
> > 8 Mb and 170 Mb.
> > Diskspace prevents installing anything not essential to the tasks the
> > machine is to perform.
> > How was I (as a Unix neophyte) to decide whether to install this?
> > Name        : sed                         Distribution: Hurricane
> > Summary     : GNU Stream Editor
> > 
> > There are lots of editors: why would I want this one?
> Because it was listed in section "Important" and because you'd be able to
> install very little else without installing this?
> If that's not the case, then Redhat have got a lot to answer for.
> 
> > > The first time I installed Linux, it was as simple as the above.
> > > I didn't remove any packages that were listed as "standard", I just added
> > > some packages from lower priorities and whatever they depended on.
> > > I got a few conflicts, so I removed a few things I had selected. (but
> > > nothing from important or above)
> > 
> > Getting a working system isn't the issue: that much was easy. Choosing the
> > products that I would find useful wasn't.
> > Yes, I've found I need sed - not because I wanted to use it, but because
> > some scripts I want to use use it.
> I am beginning to suspect that this is a major deficiency of redhat
> (though perhaps they have improved things in the interim) When I first
> installed Debian, I never got the choice to uninstall sed, unless I used
> the "force" methods which I did not know at the time.
> sed was in a package marked "important" or "required", so I knew not to
> touch, and if I had touched it, it would have given me an enormous list of
> other things that could no longer be installed. If one of those had seemed
> important to me (as in, an application I wanted as an end-user), then I
> would have made sure I selected sed for install.
> If I could run all of the things that were important to me without
> installing sed, then I would have seen this and delete sed if I so chose.
> Does Redhat make no such effort to guide first-time installers?
> 
> > If you used any unix implementation significantly before installing Linux,
> > you opinion doesn't count because you were never in the position of a
> > novice installing Linux.
> I certainly hadn't. I'd used a zsh on a OSF1 server for basic internet
> stuff, but nothing else, and no administration whatsoever.
> 
> -Greg
> 

Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
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