On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Shaul Karl wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 03:57:48PM +0200, Ben-Nes Michael wrote:
> > > Slackware considered to be hard because you need to compile everything
> > > but if you do it right its the best ( so I heard )
> > > Debian is just another way to manage the Linux with deb and not RPM but
> > > considered to be superior ( the whole system )
> >
> > I'm not familiar with Slackware (never used it), but as I heard, the
> > packaging system is quite primitive, and there aren't configuration
> > tools similar to RedHat's, so you end up learning to compile stuff
> > yourself, edit configuration files and learning sysadmining hardcode :)
> >
> > Debian's main strength is APT, which allows you to install and upgrade
> > applications, libraries etc. right off the net (from one of themany
> > Debian mirrors) by issuing one simple command. APT will take care of
> > fetching and installing all of the dependencies and the package itself,
> > just like the Aduva Manager does on RedHat :)
> > (Of course, you can install packages from a local CD-ROM as well.)
> > With servers, you could use it to upgrade various daemons to the
> > latest versions regularilly to maintain security. As for today, Debian
> > doesn't come with as much config tools as RedHat, so it's not for total
> > newbies.
> >
> > For example, instead of RedHat's RPM-hell, I can simply issue:
> > apt-get install mysql libapache-mod-perl php4-mysql libapache-mod-ssl
> > (this will also install php4 and apache, since php4-mysql and
> > libapache-mod-perl depend on them)
urpmi mysql
etc.
should work just as well on Mandrakes.
urpm still lacks m,any of the features of apt, but it is getting there.
There is also the port of apt to rpm by connectiva, which seems to work
fine for them.
>
> Debian is*not* just another way to manage Linux with deb and not RPM.
> It took another route:
>
> 1) About 500 Debian maintainers.
> 2) Debian policy, which is one of reasons for the supposedly technical
> superiority.
The reasn for a strict policy, is that without such policy, 500
maintainers would have created a total mess. This was the original problem
faced by debian - with less maintainers, though.
It can still be claimed that debian lacks "vision" and "direction".
500 different maintainers mean that you get much of the availble software
for linux with debian. But what happens when ne wants to focus efforts on
a certain partof the distro?
An evident to that are the installers of corel and storm. Debian still
lackas an easy-to-use installer. But it does not seem like it took Corel
or Storm much time to write one.
> 3) It is produced by an organization, as opposed to a commercial company.
Yes. But RedHat and Mandrake are GPLed (unlike SuSE and Caldera).
> 4) One of its goals is to let you upgrade the system in place and with as less
> interruption to production as possible.
Actually from trying to do that manually with Mandrake, I face too many
stupid problems. I fully agree here. On Mandrake they expect you to run
the installer again and choose "Upgrade" if you want to upgrade your
distro to a newer version. ou then should hunt your system for ".rpmnew"
and ".rpmsave" files and fix your config files (the install guide does not
mention that point!) and look at the log of the install to see which
upgrade script has failed (again, the install guide is optimistic here).
> 5) A huge number of packages.
> 6) Work in progress for more architectures then any other distro?
NetBSD is still ahead...
> 7) I believe it is more much popular then Slackware. Furthermore, there is the
> debian-il mailing list + some members in the local Linux community that are
> committed to Debian.
By that you also refer to the fact that many more people are experinced
with RedHat and similar, than with Debain...
>
> As for the knowledge you would gain from building the system yourself, there
> is the problem that it might take a long time. If you insists you can also try
> to build the Debian packages from source. This might be similar to building
> the binaries from src + you might get more insight by looking at the choices
> that the official Debian maintainer had done. Some of these choices would give
> you more insight from the system wide perspective, something which is more
> difficult to get when looking at each package by itself.
I must disagree here. rebuilding a distro from source RPMS/Debs is not
like putting together a distro from tarballs, because the packagers have
already done a lot of work to make sure packages will play along nicely,
and will follow certain rules.
In that sense slackware is indeed a useful experience.
There is also a project called Linux From Scratch, which should server the
same purpose. But I figure that unlike slackware, it is not aimed at being
a server (in the end), only a playtool. I never tried any of the two,
anyway.
And indeed after you have built such a server from scratch, I figure you
can have the feeling you know it well enough to handle all the problems
that may occour.
But decent distos give you the tools to locate problems and understand the
system.
For instance, 'rpm -qf' is a powerful tool. It will help you identify who
put the file there (if the file was put by a package, that is). Using
additional switches you can get other files in that package (docs!),
description of the package, etc.
>
> In short, among {Debian, Slackware} I choose Debian.
In short, in {RedHat, Slackware} I choose Redhat
>
> Yet all the above is written without real Slackware experience. Can a
> Slackware user tell us what he consider to be Slackware advantages?
Applies to my writing as well. Slackware did get flamed badly here, I'm
afaraid.
For the record, there are other rpm-based distros that are not
RedHat. Even Mandrake, that was originally dereived from RedHat, and still
shares many of the basic components, is a seperate distro.
Therefore you may also consider other distros, to see if their policies
look better.
in
http://www2.iol.co.il/communikit/scripts/polls/html/128/answers_590.asp
RedHat came as the most popular, second was Mandrake, and third was
slackware.
Debian was fifth, after SuSE.
But there were only ~ 250 answers.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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