[plug] Distro Wars

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Thu, 6 May 1999, Mike Holland wrote:
> On Thu, 6 May 1999, Christian wrote:
> > A distribution war, did you say? ;-)
> Ok. What are the areas to compare? i.e. where does distro matter.
> 2) Package management
>   (RH was the leader here.)

HAHAHA.
HAHAHAHA.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
HAHA.
HA.

I am sure Redhat has never been the leader in this dept.
It certainly isn't at the moment.
When it first started, it possibly had the nicest package management
utilites, but the packages didn't conform to their specs, so it amounted
to very little.
These days, they are much tighter in terms of quality control and making
packages fit their guidelines (though their guidelines are not as detailed
or thought out as some other dists) but RPM is a fair way behind (for
instance) DPKG so far as package management utils/formats go.
All of the newer formats from the minor distributions are more functional 
than either, but I would only consider RPM, DEB and TGZ to be tried and
tested Linux package formats.

-Greg