Re: [PLUG] Religious Questions

[Tobias DiPasquale <toby@cbcg.net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sep 13, 2004, at 1:07 AM, sean finney wrote:
> debian has more than apt going for it.  how about one of the most 
> active
> user communities in the world, a completely transparent and open
> development process, a *constitution and social contract*, a well
> functioning bug management system, and a huge collection of freely
> available software?  stable is "balls slow" because it was designed
> to be exactly that.  if you want something faster moving, you can pull
> what you want from testing when you need it.  we've had this argument
> in the past...

Yes, we have, but someone asked about it again. ;-)

Seriously, though, RH/SuSE have Bugzilla, too (and they work) and I 
would imagine that the only thing you mentioned above that RH and SuSE 
lack is the social contract. The development process is the same (just 
faster), RH has more software available than Debian and stable is 
__too__ slow IMO. Plus, you can't just pull what you want from testing, 
b/c that will almost invariably pull stuff that you do not want, as 
well (think libc dependency). And, finally, if you do decide to grab 
from testing, forget about security updates for those pieces of 
software (at least, from Debian itself).

In any case, my preferred distro is Gentoo. Its just that RH gets a bit 
of a bad rap from the tech cognoscenti and IMO its a little undeserved.

> i won't argue that it isn't more complicated, but it makes for a more
> robust packaging system.  however, there are alternatives to having
> to use dpkg for your own in-house software needs.  if you're trying
> to make custom packages to satisfy some kind of missing dependency,
> use equivs.  if you're just trying to make it easier to keep 
> pre-compiled
> software distributed among your servers, use stow and rsync.

equivs?

> in the us, you can find more people who use redhat because redhat does
> a great job of marketing as well as providing a viable commercial
> product which fits in well with a corporate ethos (the "user friendly"
> installer is helpful too).  they actively engage proprietary vendors
> to "certify" software for their platform, and provide "support".
>
> as a result, more companies want people with redhat experience, and 
> thus
> more people get redhat training/certification.  this has nothing to do
> with technical superiority or higher quality of their product, just
> a better mind/market share.

Yeah, those are good points and emminently true. I was just saying you 
could find more people, not why.

> i highly recommend postfix.  better security record than sendmail,
> and much easier to configure too.  so, we seem to agree on at least
> something :)

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day! :)

- --
Tobias DiPasquale
202A 04C4 2CE6 B985 8520  88D6 CD25 1A6C B9B5 1595
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFBRY2gzSUabLm1FZURAgVGAKCckrLqvfF9TtB3P4MckALuUYVCnwCgnk3N
+aXOGoFUlywEeI+WOsjxl30=
=IJlO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug