On 5/9/05, Dan Kaspi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > >I can easily update all of my software with the latest security updates. > > Well , if I am not wrong this is only specific to Debian. (BTW : I don't > know Debian : > I want to take advantage of this opportunity and ask : does > only non-stable Debian have this feature or also the stable Debian?)
(I don't see this as a reason for distro wars as someone else warned, I'll just try to answer the questions from my experience with Debian) Non-stable debian doesn't have guarentee that security updates will be timely, though as far as I can tell they are usually provided together with the security updates for "stable" (if they are relevant for "testing"). Security updates are also pushed faster to "testing" through the queue (again, I'm not sure, the debian developers among us might be able to chip in on this?). As a refference - one of the items about the Sarge freeze announced last week was that the debian security task force startted to cover security for Sarge as well and will provide security updates for it during the freeze. > > And I assume it is possible to install in Debian a program not by using > that util ? (like running ./config and make and make install)? > (So this DEbian util does not cover all ) You can manually extract the files from the debian package (it uses standard ar(1) format for the .deb file and tar/gz for files inside it). Also Debian's tools won't touch anything under /usr/local so you can calmly manage that space (there are many tools to help you do that). I think that /usr/local part is dictates by the standard hierarchy (whatever it's called today). Debian (and other distro's) convenience is that it packages many utilities and add-ons in an easy uniform interface to download/install/config. This should be possible to do also on Windows (there is nothing special about the Linux kernel), only it haven't been done yet. People can probably come up with many reasons (one I can think of is the proprietary and non-free-as-in-speech nature of the licenses of most Windows utilities). There are tucows.com/download.com etc., only there is no central body (that I'm aware of) to help Windows users track changes convenietly, security patches etc - they have to keep track of each installed utility separatly. (Maybe it's an idea for a startup? :) > Windows of course does not have such a util; there is LiveUpdate and > Microsoft WindowUpdate and > service packs; However, if you take other linux distros linux into account > , you can't tell that this is really > an advantage (unless there are some more distros which have this feature - I > don't know of such). Maybe what you could do to help your friend consider open-source is to start with open-source tools on top of Windows. Once they get familiar with Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice the switch to a well-configured linux desktop might be a little easier (and the community get more hit-counts for Firefox on the Israeli web :). Cheers, --Amos ================================================================To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
