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

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Peter Wright wrote:
> Greg, Christian, John, etc...
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2000 at 05:07:50PM +0800, Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> > On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, John Summerfield wrote:
> > > The big disadvantage of tarballs is that rpm doesn't know what
> > > files it installs, so upgrading & removing are both more
> > > difficult.
> > No, that's an _advantage_ over unofficial RPMs. You put the files
> > where they are, so you know what to remove.
> Of course mixing tarballs with package-managed stuff can cause
> problems unless you know what you're doing. Hence if you
> compiling/installing stuff from tarballs, you usually do it under
> /usr/local or /opt or whatever, specifically so you can make sure it
> doesn't pollute your nice wholesome package-managed /usr partition.

Hence the tarball is better than using an unofficial RPM which will not
confine itself to /usr/local or /opt, and may also play havoc with your
packages database.

> Debian's package management is something that I don't think you can
> fully appreciate the wonder of until you try it and use it for a
> little while. The 'ports' tree for the BSDs is the only thing that
> comes close. It seriously rocks.

I think this is why Debian is so popular amongst knowledgable users
(particularly those administrating Linux on production systems) but
doesn't tend to get such rave reviews from casual reviewers - it's not the
out-of-the-box performance, it's the performance over time when you are
depending on the system.

> > If something is packaged with only one distro, I wouldn't touch it. :)
> > OK, so that's a generalisation, but still a rule of thumb.
> I'm guessing you probably meant more "usable with only one distro,
> (excepting those apps that are to do with distro-specific
> control/configuration and would thus be essentially pointless on
> another distro)", am I right?

Yes, but I also meant the proprietary things that Caldera and SuSe tend to
integrate too far into their distros - if something is good, and is Free,
(like-speech-not-beer) then every distro will have it or an equivalent. If
only one distro has it, you start to wonder whether it is either not good
enough of not Free enough for the others to touch.

> On Tue, Feb 22, 2000 at 09:13:35AM +0000, Christian wrote:
> [ John wrote ]
> > > > If I install another vendor's distro, it will because of something else
> > > > packaged with it.
> > Debian has APT, no other distribution has it.  By your own
> > reasoning, you should consider installing Debian.
> If he doesn't want/need APT (or any other Debian-specific app), then I
> guess there's no reason for him to try Debian. :)

But everyone needs APT. :)

-Greg