Bad experiences with distros (was Re: [H-GEN] CRUX (A programmers linux distro))

[David Jericho]

Bradley Marshall wrote:

>On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 04:42:52PM +1000, David Jericho wrote:
>  
>
>>I have Kickstart setups here 
>>that'll rebuild a workstation from cold metal in about 15 minutes at 1.8 
>>GBytes installed. It takes another 10 to update the box using yum or 
>>up2date.
>>    
>>
>
>Doesn't it seem wrong that the updating takes 2/3rds of the time of the
>install?
>  
>

No, why should it? The distribution is proactive with respect to bugs 
and security issues, and I do have to reboot the machine. Fedora Core 1 
is over a year old now and anyone who's been paying attention on 
debian-security, fedora-security or any of the million other security 
mailing lists will notice a lot of patches have been made. RPM also does 
do MD5 sums and other paranoia checks on files it's responsible for. On 
a new file system, it only needs to check it wrote the file correctly.

I could be using one of the *BSDs or Gentoo, often recompiling my 
security patches from source. I could also be using Solaris with a 
shockingly bad auto updater that never quite works right after following 
the documentation like a zealot, or a recommended patch set installer 
that seems to try to install everything without first checking if it has 
been applied in the past.

Out of interest, I just did check what does get updated on an install. 
The kernel-source at 40MB compressed, OpenOffice at 73 compressed, Perl 
at 15 compressed, and XFree86 at around 30 compressed. Glibc and a SMP 
and non-SMP kernel will also get updated. I don't have a problem so far 
with 10 minutes.

The only thing I do miss about Debian is apt-list-changes that informs 
me of changes between versions before I install them.