On Sat, Feb 27, 1999 at 03:03:13PM -0500, Ben Cornett wrote:
> A number of you have offhandedly remarked that you believe Debian to be
> technically superior to the RH distribution. I was wondering if anyone
> would care to elaborate on that a bit for me. Currently I am running
> RH5.2, but I am thinking of switching over to Debian once the final
> version of slink is available -- mainly because I like the idea behind
> the Debian project and not because I am in any way dissatisfied with the
> RH distribution, which seems quite good to me. If anyone has any
> objective thoughts on the relative technical merits of the two
> distributions, I'd like to hear them.
> Thanks,
>
> Ben Cornett
>
>
> --
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>
One reason is that Debian has a large number of packages (2400 in potato, and
just under 2000
in slink). All of the package maintainers communicate, so thus the packages
work more smoothly
together. As far as DPKG vs RPM, I think that (correct me if I'm wrong) the
following
two features make DPKG better:
1. DPKG has multiple levels of depends, indicating that a program REQUIRES
another program,
RECOMMEDNS another program, or SUGGESTS another program. Also, Debian
subdivides packages
into multiple ones to avoid duplication and reduce download sizes when upgrades
are made.
2. With Debian and DFTP or APT, you don't have to worry about RedHat releasing
a distribution.
When I switched from RH 4.2 to Debian, I stopped worrying about version
numbers. Once every
week or two, I just have to use DSelect to update my list of packages. Then, I
just type
'apt-get upgrade' to get the latest bugfixes. I've never bought a Debian CD,
but I've
installed over 28.8, ISDN, and cable modems.
--
Stephen Pitts
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
webmaster - http://www.mschess.org
