[plug] Controversial comparison of distros?

[Cameron Patrick]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 03:35:17PM +0800, sscott at iinet.net.au wrote:

| > Exactly.  And as such, they make different packaging decisions based on
| > the appropriateness for a particular target audience or purpose.  
| 
| My point is that the choice of packaging would not materially affect this and 
| is therefore nothing more than an added burden to package maintainers. How 
| would debian's 'appropriateness' change if the package format was changed from 
| deb to rpm? 

How would Red Hat's appropriateness change if the package format was
changed from rpm to deb?  It wouldn't, but there'd be a lot of inertia
against what would be seen as making an incredibly large change for very
little perceived gain.

| Point being (for the humour impaired), each distribution has a target
| audience. 

Yeah, I got the point.  I shall plead guilty to the charge of humour
impairment earlier this afternoon (and possibly at other times too) :-/

| The rpm format is not set in stone. Fix it.

Why?  The deb format has suited Debian's purposes admirably for longer
than rpm has existed.  Would you argue that Red Hat and Mandrake should
choose to using deb and fix any misfeatures they find in the process?
Of course not.

| Not true. Youd have to agree, that just about every Linux distribution in 
| existance would be capable of running just about every linux app in existance, 
| with varying levels of effort.

Yes.  But the binaries + associated files which work on one distribution
aren't guaranteed to work on another.

| > One could argue that Debian requires deb packages instead of rpm
| > packages for the same reason that Red Hat requires rpm packages instead
| > of self-installing exe files.  Sure, the differences between Debian and
| > Red Hat may be lesser in magnitude than those between Red Hat and
| > Windows, but the principle of different operating systems generally
| > requiring different versions of software packages remains sound.
| 
| Youve lost me here, Im not too bright today. Can you elaborate?

I was trying to say that different distributions of Linux (and the
*BSDs) should be perhaps be treated as different operating systems which
just happen to share a common kernel (except for the BSDs), and have a
lot of bundled software in common.

Cameron.

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