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

[John Summerfield]

> On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, John Summerfield wrote:
> > Most times I can find an rpm created for Red Hat, though often for the 
> > wrong version.
> And hence rarely better than a tarball, and usually worse.

Twaddle.

I can type rpm --rebuild a darn sight faster than I can untar and read the 
instructions.


> 
> > 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. Who knows what an unofficial RPM
> might do?

rpm --erase removes it.
rpm -ql lists all its files.

> 
> > I use RHL because it works. I have no problem with folk using other 
> > distros, however, I don't expect I'd recoup the time converting if I did 
> > convert to something else.
> You might be surprised. Probably depends how much and how many Linux
> systems you use, and whether they are production/development/stuff-around.

DTo be sure it depends on how many boxes. I said "I."

If I were employed to look after a few thousand of them, it might be 
different.

> 
> > If I install another vendor's distro, it will because of something else 
> > packaged with it.
> 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.

Caldera has shipped stuff not available from others at times; I think it 
recently had SO included, and cost heaps less than RHL.

If I wanted to upgrade to a new release and xxxxdist has Oracle and I want 
to play with Oracle, getting xxxxdist makes sense.


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