Debian flamewar (plus a "GNU/Linux" rant)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, at 12:01pm, pri.lugofnh at iadonisi.to wrote:
>> There must be something about this that is either hard to comprehend, or
>> hard to accept.  It gives a lot of RPM users trouble, it gives Debian
>> users a sense of superiority,
> 
>   Um, Ben ... I take exception to this.  By saying that it is hard to
> comprehend or hard to accept your are implying that the problem is on my
> end.

  That was not my intent.  As I said, I know *you* know this.  I was trying
communicate an observation that it appears, *in general*, people have a
problem with this concept.  People, *in general*, keep trying to blame
things on a package manager, or a dependency manager, or a binary package
repository, or a lack of any of these, when the cause is really just that
binary compatibility is simply a lot harder then many people *in general*
appreciate.

  Hope that clears that up.  :-)

> You may not agree with my estimates of what most problems with rpm
> have to do with ...

  If anything, I strongly *agree* with your views on this subject.

> I don't believe for a second that it has much to do with Debian users'
> sense of superiority.

  I was attempting to assert, about half-seriously, that the binary
compatibility confusion issue was a contributor to Debian elitism.  
Specifically, that having such a large pool of configured, compiled, and
tested packages readily available via "apt-get install foo" leads a lot of
Debian people into think APT is somehow magic.

  Likewise, RPM properly saying "I don't think you have the pieces you need
for this to work" leads so many people into thinking that RPM *causes*
"dependency hell".  And the fact that BSD ports downloads, configures,
builds, and installs all the specified components *from source* leads BSD
bigots into thinking that the BSD ports packagers must be doing a much
better job then Red Hat or Debian packagers.

  And, again, it's also largely responsible for why Windoze sucks so much.  
When everything a binary which you have no source for, and no two packages
share information on what is being installed, and you can only install one
version of any given library at once time -- then, yah, it's a minor kind of
miracle the thing ever works at all.

  :-)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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