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

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, John Summerfield wrote:
> > 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.
> I can type rpm --rebuild a darn sight faster than I can untar and read the 
> instructions.

It's been a while since I RPMed seriously, but doesn't this just take a
source package and build then install it? Don't the files still end up in
whatever silly place the person who made the RPM put them? Doesn't it
modify your package database in ways that may conmflict with the official
Redhat packages you want to install or uninstall in the future?
Still, as long as it prevents you having to read the instructions...

> > 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.
And by the time you've found out exactly what it's putting where and
changed them to sensible places and parsed the install script and written
things down so you can check that the uninstall script is sane before you
run it and clean up after it, you could have just plonked a tarball
somewhere sensible and configured it so as not to conflict with the rest
of the carefully-managed system, with a few minutes left over to skim over 
the instructions, or perhaps do something more important if you're as busy
a person as John is.

> > > I use RHL because it works.
Does it though? I'd be astonished if your haphazard approach to installing
third-party RPMs hasn't led to things breaking down here or there. Have
you ever reinstalled a Linux distribution?

> > > 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.
> If I were employed to look after a few thousand of them, it might be 
> different.
If you were employed to admin just one box, it would be different. Well,
OK, it should be different - you might have a boss who uses windows and
thinks DLL hell is a natural part of system administration, but your
conscience should step in in that situation. :)

> > > 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.
Well, apart from my inherent distrust of non-free bloatware like SO... I
though most of the distros included it, though many will of course have a 
core distribution of Free software?

> If I wanted to upgrade to a new release and xxxxdist has Oracle and I want 
> to play with Oracle, getting xxxxdist makes sense.
Does it? Oracle is, AFAIK, completely distribution-independent, so it'd be
a very poor basis on which to choose distributions.

-Greg