Debian flamewar (was: Can I bother you with another Linux question?)

[Ben Scott]

  IMPORTANT NOTE #1: Regular readers of this list will recognize the
subject line, which I drag out whenever a Debian luser makes a
particularly egregious claim about what they consider God's Chosen
Distribution.  People who are not interested in pointless flame and
debate should delete any message they see with this subject line.

  IMPORTANT NOTE #2: While my message below is written in the mode of
a flame, my tongue is at least somewhere in the vicinity of my cheek. 
While I believe the points I raise are valid, if I were looking for a
serious discussion, I would use far less sarcasm and invective.  But I
know from experience that serious discussions with religious bigots
are pointless.  That doesn't preclude me from having fun at their
expense, though.  :-)

On 11/17/05, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
>    Even then it may not work is there are missing dependencies on the part
> of THAT library as well.
>
>    Why I hate rpm and love debian..  ;-)

#ifdef FLAME

  For the love of $DEITY.  You must be going for a record on the
number of stupid assumptions per number of words.

  Let me break out my clue-bat...

  *WHACK*

  RPM is a package manager, Debian is a distribution.  That is like
saying "Why I hate Cool Ranch Doritos and love Nabisco."  I expect you
mean "APT".

  *WHACK*

  RPM is a package manager, APT is a dependency manager.  They are not
the same kind of tool.  The equivalent of RPM on Debian systems is
"dpkg".  The equivalent of APT on Red Hat is "up2date"; on Fedora it's
"yum".  Get a freaking clue.

  *WHACK*

  The reason the person ran into trouble was because they were not
aware of any of these tools.  How the h*ll is Debian going to do
better when all someone does is "scp /usr/X11/lib/libXm.so
some.other.host:/usr/X11/lib/"?!?  Is Debian patching their kernels to
intercept all file I/O calls and fire off APT if someone copies a file
the wrong way?

  *WHACK*

  Debian would be a really nice distribution if it wasn't managed by a
bunch of overzealous fools who have lost all connection with reality. 
The Debian creed is "Debian is God's Chosen Distribution.  Debian is
Perfect.  All Glory to Debian!"  The problem is that any attempt to
report any kind of bug, conflict, issue, or RFE to a Debian person
results in being met as a heretic.  After all, Debian is *perfect*. 
Any suggestion that things might be otherwise is a direct attack on
the Deity.  Such reports are thus ignored.  Thus, Debian generally
does not improve, or does so at a glacial pace.  It really has
devolved to that point.  It's pathetic, and it's a damn shame to see a
project with such noble goals and ideals ruined by such mindless
elitism.

  *WHACK*cluebat snaps*

#endif

  I find "yum" does very well when it comes to solving dependencies on
Fedora and CentOS systems.  "up2date" worked fine on Red Hat systems,
when I still used those.  I've noticed "yum" appears somewhat slower
then "apt-get" for many operations, though.  Which is curious, as I
also find "rpm" to be somewhat faster then "dpkg" in most cases.

-- Ben "Software Atheist" Scott