I have to ask....

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Oh come on! The only 2 repos I have in addition to Fedora's repo are Livna and Mplayer and I get so many choices. I never had a single issue with Livna's repo.

And with Debian sid I have ~17,000 packages available with just 1 extra repo. And I have heard people complain about Livna, maybe it's gotten better though.

RedHat is a company and very important one, they can't host thing's that might be conspicious they can't put stuff in there that might backfire at them either from a court or from their clients.

I couldn't care less about them leaving out legally ambiguous packages, Debian is a lot more strict about what gets let into their distribution. But RH seems to consider man pages 'conspicious' because there doesn't seem to be man pages for like 50% of the binaries on the system. Part of the Debian policy is that every binary must have a man page and it's really annoying when there isn't one.

And what's the big deal about adding another repo, so how hard is it ? And what big of a deal is it ?

It's not about the amount of work, it's about trusting someone not part of the distribution to produce packages of the same quality as the official ones.

And why is the rpm so bad ? You know in the real world you will stumble across pakcages that are not available on a repo, in my case if I stumble across some un-common app, but if I decided that I need it, it's all a matter of clicking that rpm and it's installed, I don't think you can do that with Debian now can you ? Just look on the internet how many websites have their apps in rpm format.

RPMs themselves aren't bad, I never said they were. In the real world, I don't download packages from random websites. Just about everything I use is packaged in Debian already. I can only think of one package I have installed that's not part of Debian and I used alien to convert to a .deb and it worked just fine.

I can back up my applications all onto a CD or whatever, and if I go to another machine and that machine doesn't have an internet connection or a slow one I just select them all from the media to install and bam they are there.

And I can mirror an entire repository with debmirror, what's your point?

Originally posted by: Nothinman

What is so bad about rpm? hmmm....how about never knowning where the heck the files are located without a find

Look at the --filesbypkg option to RPM.

No specific location where the documents are

/usr/share/doc is the FHS location.

and it's all binary files! (if i recall correctly, I rather have source thanks!)

Of course they're binaries, wtf is the point of installing the source code? If you really want the source, grab the .src.rpm.

Haha, leave it to Nothinman to bash a distro in one post and then justify it in the next!

 

[xtknight]

I think OpenSUSE 10 is a lot more complete (intuitive also) than Fedora Core. However Fedora Core is still a decent distro. SUSE can seem a bit big at times. I just think SUSE would be easier for transitioners. Granted I first used Linux probably 5 years ago, even I consider myself still a transitioner. I definitely haven't used it every day for 5 years. Speaking of which I want to try another distro. 😉

 

[Nothinman]

Haha, leave it to Nothinman to bash a distro in one post and then justify it in the next!

I was bashing FC and justifying RPM, they're not mutually exclusive =)

I just hate people that bitch about RPM but don't have any real reasons why, they just do it because it's cool now and because they remember having dependency problems with their RH52 box. The cli swithces to RPM are annoying and hard to remember, but otherwise the program itself is fine.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Haha, leave it to Nothinman to bash a distro in one post and then justify it in the next!

I was bashing FC and justifying RPM, they're not mutually exclusive =)

I just hate people that bitch about RPM but don't have any real reasons why, they just do it because it's cool now and because they remember having dependency problems with their RH52 box. The cli swithces to RPM are annoying and hard to remember, but otherwise the program itself is fine.

Exactly.

Most problems with RPM come from people making crappy packages, not so much that rpm itself sucks. That and there was no real way to intellegently handle installing software based on dependancies.

The major reason why Ubuntu/Debian apt-get is so nice isn't so much to do with apt-get as much as Debian has very high quality deb packages and cover and officially the vast majority of popular Linux/Free/OSS software.

Actually I think that RPM is quite a bit more robust and is technically superior then Dpkg, but that the front end tools (yum vs apt-get) aren't so hot and that the package selection is less.

Also differences in OS design factor into it. In Debian everything is delt with with packages. All OS isntalls and initiall configuration and settings is controlled almost exclusively through package management.

This makes Debian onerious to use as you have to submit to the 'lord dpkg' in all things to keep your system healthy. On the other hand doing upgrades, upgrades between stable releases, and long term survival of the system is easier because of this.

With Fedora and whatnot you have to use Anaconda (from the cd installer) to automate many changes between certain configurations between OS releases... or go through a lot of manual configuration changes. (to do it "properly") Otherwise keeping track of the latest releases with just using yum or whatnot leads to degradation over time and increases the PITA factor.

Again the way Fedora does it leads to quicker and easier upgrades on the development side (releases every 6 months versus 3 years for Debian) and it's easier to support 3rd party software for their Redhat EL releases. With Debian you can track newer software then generally what is aviable from Fedora by using Unstable (or about the same with Testing), but with big transitions (like X version changes or gcc version changes or kde or gnome version changes) it can be very irritating as just a regular end-user to deal with.