Ben Cornett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: BC> A number of you have offhandedly remarked that you believe Debian BC> to be technically superior to the RH distribution. I was BC> wondering if anyone would care to elaborate on that a bit for me.
-- Debian packages only depend on other packages. AFAICT RPM has this weird provides/depends thing, where a package in theory "provides" itself and every file in it, and other packages depend on something the package provides. This means that packages can do unuseful things like depend on /bin/sh, and then lose if no packages is actually providing it. -- Debian maintained backwards compatability across the libc5 -> glibc upgrade. Red Hat didn't. Library building problems that Debian was in the process of fixing when I first installed it close to two years ago are still unresolved in Red Hat. -- There's a single canonical location for Debian packages, and they'll all work on your system. The only things that don't seem to be in the main archive are alpha versions of major bits of Debian (e.g. GNOME-APT). -- APT. Automatic dependency checking in general (which dselect does, but less well). -- A conspicuous lack of packages that install themselves under /opt or /usr/local. Well-defined packaging standards that are actually adhered to. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/ "Hey, Doug, do you mind if I push the Emergency Booth Self-Destruct Button?" "Oh, sure, Dave, whatever...you _do_ know what that does, right?"
