Why I use Debian. Was Re: [plug] Mandrake - printing

[Garth Atkinson]

Christian wrote:
> 
> Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> > > To Greg: Does this mean you've sworn off APT? :-)
> > Well, yeah, rules of thumb... I think you broke my thumb. I meant at an
> > applications level. Obviously the things that are part of the distro such
> > as package management and install disks don't have to be universal, or
> > there wouldn't be such things as different distros. Point taken though -
> > there are things that should be universal that are inexplicably not taken
> > up by others, though Corel, Storm and the one I _still_ can't remember the
> > name of do apt now, too.
> 
> Yeah, I wasn't serious actually because I do take your point and agree
> with it (sort of).  If one distribution introduced something new that
> was better than what the others had but was free (GPL and/or BSD
> licensed probably: at least DFSG-compliant) and didn't introduce
> incompatibilities then I would be in favour of it.  APT meets these
> criteria I feel (the incompatibility with RPM is with the package format
> which is both pre-existing and not strongly connected with APT).  On the
> other hand something new which was either non-free OR introduced new
> incompatabilities would be something I would generally avoid.
> 
> BTW, I think the name you can't think of is "Storm Linux".
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Christian.
How well rounded is this APT? I've already seen on this list someone
griping over missing features. 

If the linux community (and all its distros) are to get behind APT, then
it needs to be perfect (exceptional product)(The good old compelling
reason).

There would be a tremendous amount of energy expended to convert all the
different formats available to something supported by APT. It could only
be done once.

How difficult would it be to script a cronned shell script using rpm and
wget to interrogate RH mirrors for upgrades anyway? Or am I missing
something? Or is it the internet resources that are better for debian?


Garth