A plague of daemons and the Unix Philosophy

[Jarod Wilson]

On Monday 12 November 2007 11:14:40 am Neil Joseph Schelly wrote:
> On Monday 12 November 2007 10:50, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> > This disturbs me. I hear great things about Ubuntu, but AFAICT, Fedora is
> > the best and most cutting edge distro AND it's RPM based. I'm sorry, but
> > I have no desire to move to a deb based system.
> >
> > If I was to contemplate a different distro, is there anything that is RPM
> > based that people can say better things about?

I don't know of any major contender in the rpm-based world outside of Fedora, 
openSUSE and Mandriva.

I've played with openSUSE 10.3 a bit, and really don't have anything nice to 
say about it, other than its nice to have flash working out of the box. Of 
course, I only poked at their Gnome desktop, which has this ghastly Gnome 
menu replacement thing that I believe attempts to emulate some crap in Vista. 
Probably possible to turn that off, but overall, the desktop still just felt 
slow and clunky (I saw similar reviews in the wild), and looked way too much 
like it was trying to be Windows, which may or may not be a coincidence, 
given the whole Novell/MS pact... I've heard good things about KDE in 10.3 
from a buddy though. I'll have to check that out at some point. Oh, and yast 
still makes me gag with some of the stupid crap it does...

Playing with the latest Mandriva is also still on my todo list. Prior releases 
have felt more like toys than an OS I'd want for a development workstation or 
a server though.


> Why is RPM or DEB a determining factor?  If you have a distro you like,
> then you use it.  If you're looking for another one, then you're already
> looking to change the respositories and the filesystem layouts and daemons
> and other nuances that differentiate one distro from another.  I guess if
> you're in the market for a new distro already, why eliminate DEB-based
> ones?

In my own case, its a fairly major distinction, because I already know rpm 
inside and out. I know how to build an rpm quickly from scratch, from the 
spec file up, including some fairly complex ones. I know how to take an 
existing src.rpm and create an updated/patched rpm out of it. I know various 
ways to manipulate an rpm at install/uninstall/upgrade time. I know how to 
manually unpack an rpm w/o actually installing it. I know how to extract all 
sorts of information about what's installed on my system from the rpm 
database. And so on.

I'm sure with some time and effort, I could figure out how to do at least most 
of the same with a deb-based system, but there's definitely a learning curve. 
Last time I tried to do some of the same things I regularly do with a kernel 
src.rpm, I just about lost my lunch.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com