Re: [Nolug] Arrogant Linux

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
> On 03/05/2011 09:26 AM, Joey Kelly wrote:
>> "Without Debian we are nothing. Debian is the most influential and >> important
>> What a load of horse-hockey. I'm getting extremely tired of the Debian
>> community, as it seems to breed nothing but idiots these days. Remember
>> Ice >> Ape? Or the SSH fail?

It is a fallacy to attribute the words of one person to the Debian community;
you have a few gung-ho Debian people's sentiment. I don't think the majority
of the Debian community is so confident Debian is "the most important", etc.

Ubuntu is Debian-based.
Ubuntu currently enjoys a status as popular/chosen distro of a fair
amount of Linux users,
and the work of the Debian project has been influential, in that some
popular distros were
based on it or continue to utilize Debian as an upstream much of the
user community
has some familiarity with Debian's idiosyncracies.
Many popular distros are based on Debian, many popular distros have
nothing to do with Debian.

The most important, influential work is done by the Kernel developers.
The distributions have important things to add, but for the most part, choice of
distribution is a matter of personal preference or familiarity.

Whether you are using Debian, Redhat, or Rpath/Foresight Linux/Gentoo/
some less popular distro, they are all Linux, and the kernel is the defining
characteristic.

>> About a year ago, I started converting my Debian boxes to anything but,
>> out of >> spite

I think/hope you should have a better reason than that.
Otherwise, you risk proving yourself as unreasonable as the person
claiming "Debian is the most influential and important"

Even "Converted all my Debian boxes to something else in order to _to
prove I can_"
seems a more rational reason.

> Anyway, the dpkg/apt/policy infrastructure is just *superior* to RPM.
No. No.

DPKG and RPM package managers both have pros and cons.
They are both tools that usually work correctly and decently accomplish
what they were designed to do when they work correctly.
Neither is clearly superior nor inferior; the tools offer different
capabilities.

Admin convenience can differ in varying situations, and is only one
characteristic
of a good package management tool/system.

The way "infrastructure" and "package repositories" themselves are arranged
are separate from the package management tool itself also.
A distro can have the "best" package management tool in the world, but totally
botch up the way they organize the distribution's packages and dependencies.

Certain DPKG-based distros Debian seem to do a lot better a job organizing
and naming some packages than certain RPM-based distros.

If you ran into "RPM Hell" but failed so far to run into "DPKG Hell",
 then, perhaps,
you really haven't done much at all with DPKG-based distros and APT
repositories.

Because I can say with certainty I have run into both RPM hell on Redhat-based
distros and DPKG hell on Debian-based distros at different times.

And, frankly, DPKG hell was worse. At least with RPM there are some decent
overrides available that won't turn yum into a brick the way DPKG
hell turns apt-get/aptitude
into a brick.

And yes... bugginess of the package manager or susceptibility to DB corruption,
and recovery procedures are also considerations.

If you lose your /var/lib/dpkg/status database
file, or it gets corrupted, with DPKG you are totally hosed.

With RPM, there is a procedure to rebuild/recover your database from
package header files.

--
-Jh
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org