[H-GEN] Computing without GUI

Anthony Towns aj at azure.humbug.org.au
Sun Jan 28 20:44:18 EST 2001


On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 10:12:40AM +1000, David Jericho wrote:
> For my home systems, I find it far eaiser to use RedHat. To put it simply,
> there are _very_ few debian package maintainers, that IMHO actually do a good
> job, and do it right (Hiya aj). That problem in my eyes mostly wrote off the
> advantages of apt. I don't use redhat-contrib either.

(For those playing along at home, David doesn't like missing a chance to
advocate Red Hat over Debian. *sigh* I remember the good ol' days when
using Debian was the exception, and *we* were the ones what got to be
daring and controversial)

You (or other Red Hat weenies) might like to try a Conectiva install,
which should be a mostly Red Hat system, but with a working, rpm version
of apt-get. I've heard rumours Mandrake will be borrowing Conectiva's
port of apt for their next release too.

The apt style of thinking works pretty well in a Debian context, where you
start off from (one way or another) a fairly boring, minimal system and then
add packages that you might want from there. It works well because the minimal
system really is pretty minimal, and there are *lots* of other packages you
can grab.

> Not having run Debian in the last 1 1/2 years, I don't know if any advances
> have been made towards making compiling your own debs much easier, but I
> always found RPMs incredibly easy to roll.

(Generally, especially for packages using autoconf, you can just run
dh_make, and you'll have all the work to make a functional, largely
policy conformant .deb done for you. One of the differences between
making an rpm and a deb is that there's probably a bit more emphasis
on, well, risk-avoidance with debs: you generally build them as a user
rather than root (apt-get install fakeroot), you make install them under
./debian/tmp rather than in /, and after they've been built there are a
bunch of automated checks run to make sure you ended up with something
vaguely sensible (apt-get install lintian))

>If you're someone that really likes to tinker with their systems, and they're
>something that you play with endlessly, debian is probably the system for you. 
>If you're the set and forget type, short of security updates, something like
>RedHat is just as good.

I'm not sure that's entirely accurate: it's certainly pretty easy to
"forget" a Debian system, and just let it apt-get dist-upgrade from
security.debian.org every so often.

I'm fairly sure you can fiddle with a Red Hat system for hours on end too,
if you want.

One real difference, though, seems to be that with Red Hat you can just
tell it "I want a development system", and you'll get a development
system, you don't have to apt-get install this, and apt-get install
that, and then apt-get install something-else all the time. In theory,
the new task-* packages in Debian 2.2 and beyond would offer the same
sort of thing for Debian, but Andrae's experience with them seems to
indicate it doesn't really work out like that.

> Plus, I like the the fedora. :)

Pfft. If we chose distributions based on the logo, we'd all be using a
*BSD exclusively. Don't try to deny it.

(The Red Hat people are welcome to jump in and correct me on any of the
above: I've used Red Hat less, and less recently, than David's used Debian,
I'm sure)

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
  do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
                      -- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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