[H-GEN] which Redhat?

[Russell Stuart]

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On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 12:07, Robert Kearey wrote:
> >   This is a reason Red Hat's
> >   rpm format does not download and upgrade as easily as deb, and it
> >   has nothing with "deb technically is better than rpm".  Technically,
> >   there is very little difference between deb and rpm.  It is because
> >   Red Hat does not want you to upgrade over the web, they want you to
> >   buy Red Hat CD's, so they make upgrading hard.
> 
> Um, what? Do you mean upgrading the whole distro, or just packages? 
> Installing packages via the web is easy enough - rpm -Uvh 
> http://path/to/foo.rpm, and so on.

Yes, "rpm -Uvh" works, usually.  But not all the time.  It doesn't take
too much searching of them web to turn up references to "rpm dependency
hell".  Red Hat have in the past spilt rpm's into two, renamec rpm's and
introduced new dependencies.  up2date figures all this out for you of
course, and installs the new rpm's as required - just like apt-get.  But
if you just use "rpm -Uvh" you can easily spend half a day resolving all
the dependencies manually.  One particularly memorable occasion was when
Red Hat moved from rpm version 3 to rpm version 4.  That upgrade
defeated most people.

> http://current.tigris.org/ might be of use. Third party rhn-proxies will 
> appear in due time, but remember that rhn-proxy does much more than just 
> be a local mirror, so there's a business opportunity right there! ("Use 
> JerichoHat's rhn-proxy, and for only $39.99 a month, gain access to 
> JerichoHat's Custom Pr0n rpms!")
> 
> >  It looks like they will be charging a fee
> >   for access soon (but the free will be included in the purchase
> >   price of the CD's).  Up till now this is all they have done.

Yes, you could do that.  I will not.  It undermines Red Hat's revenue
stream.  Having seen the problems Mandrake and Suse have experianced in
recent times, I feel the business I work for should contribute something
back.  Paying for security updates seems reasonable to me.

> RHEL also includes funky stuff like JVMs, which have their own 
> redistribution agreements that make that problematic.

Does it?  I had not thought of that.  I guess that could make
distributing .iso's problematic.  But then again, I am sure they omit
the .src.rpm for the JVM from the public servers.  They could just omit
the binary rpm's from the public servers in a similar fashion.

> It boils done to this:

No disagreement there.  The road map is clear.  My point was not about
the road map, but rather about obtaining real, hard facts from Red Hat
on currently shipping products.  It should not be difficult, but right
now I have not found a way to do it.  There is no information on their
web site, and they do not answer my emails.  Its a bit disappointing
really.

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