[plug] Controversial comparison of distros?

[Cameron Patrick]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 03:21:47PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:

| I think the distinction (a meaningful one) is whether the application is
| included in the operating system or not.

Fair enough.  In that case, whether or not a given application is
considered "core" depends on the distribution - and even on the
particular version of a distribution.  Debian, for instance, appears to
make a concerted effort to package every piece of software that it is
legally able to.  Other distros adopt a more moderate approach.

A lot of people (e.g. those coming from Windows-land) would likely
consider the software included in even a less "shovelware"-prone distro
as inappropriate for a "core" operating system.

In BSD-ish systems there's a nice neat distinction between the OS
(kernel+userland) and extra software (ports).  This is much blurrier
when you're talking about Linux-y systems. Another observation is that
the amount of software included with operating systems has grown
steadily with time - compare MS-DOS with Windows XP, or early versions
of Slackware with Debian.

I'm not quite sure where I'm heading with all that so I think I'll stop
rambling now...

| The idea of non-interactive postinst scripts is great when you are
| dealing with "zero installation" consumers, but doesn't translate
| well to sysadmins.

(Perhaps that sentence could have ended at "great"?  The zillions of
debconf messages---and worse, random interactive prompts from
non-debconf-using packages---is one of the more annoying 'features' of
Debian.)

| > Exactly.  And as such, they make different packaging decisions based on
| > the appropriateness for a particular target audience or purpose.  
| 
| I like Solaris, Tru64 and OpenBSD.

...your point being what, exactly?  That you shouldn't really be on this
list at all? :-P  (Or am I just being dense and missing humour/incisive
observation?)

Cheers,

Cameron.

_______________________________________________
plug mailing list
plug at plug.linux.org.au
http://mail.plug.linux.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug