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

[Christian]

Garth Atkinson wrote:
> How well rounded is this APT? I've already seen on this list someone
> griping over missing features.

I don't remember everyone griping about it.  I think APT is very
well-rounded.  Perhaps the only limitation is the lack of a GUI
front-end and this hardly a big limitation given how ridiculously easy
it is to use.  Perhaps you should try it.

> 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).

I think the design is very, very good... probably nothing is "perfect".

> 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.

I think the actual packaging formats could probably be integrated to
work with APT without too much difficulty (they could also all convert
over to deb format but I can't see that happening).  The big change
would be in the package management infrastructure provided by the
distribution; currently Red Hat (et al) doesn't have anything
approaching what Debian has.  Of course, this change would be a good
thing so would be worthwhile for all distributions regardless of whether
they're going to try and use APT or not.

> 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?

Would this script of yours also determine the new dependencies of the
packages it was about to install and also fetch these (and their
subsequent cascading dependencies?).  Would it work out which packages
needed to be removed from the current system and do so automatically? 
If it did all these things then it would probably be virtually APT.  Let
me know when you've written this script. :-) Alternately, maybe you
should try Debian and APT to see how well it does actually work.

Regards,

Christian.