[ale] linus doesn't like Debian?

[Jeff Lightner]

rpm all by itself doesn't do any dependency checking but yum which is on
most systems that use rpm's DOES.

Funny to me is folks pooh-poohing the idea that Debian is a "technical"
thing relying on "source" compilations and then arguing that Debian
package management is superior because of the way it handles "source"
installations.  You can't have it both ways.

The average "user" (i.e. non-geek) does NOT want to compile source -
hell they don't even want to have to install packages after the fact.
They just want it to work out of the box for what they do (web surfing,
playing music, playing videos and playing games).   On this score there
aren't many distros that aren't lacking which is why it is so difficult
for us to convert friends and family to Linux.   All of these things CAN
be done on Linux of course but they take effort the "users" are not
comfortable with.

Having installed Debian (Sarge and Woody) along with Redhat and Fedora I
am continually amazed at folks that think that the apt style utilities
are easier than Yum.  These apt utilities IMO are NOT intuitive to use
at all.

The comment about dependency hell was a reference to what occurred
before yum - one would try to install an rpm only to be told they needed
another rpm which in turn would require another and so on.  Yum on the
other hand will let you pick the package you're interested in and find
the dependencies needed to install it on YOUR system and install those
at the same time.

I like the original post though - Now when people tell me other distros
are superior to Fedora I'll just ask "Then why does Linus Torvalds run
Fedora?".  I'll get all sorts of OPINIONS which aren't any better than
mine but will have the satisfaction of knowing that the guy that started
it all agrees with me.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
To: ale at ale.org
Jeremy T. Bouse
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 8:10 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] linus doesn't like Debian?

Geoffrey wrote:
> Michael B. Trausch wrote:
>
>   
>> I did think that it was a very interesting read, though.  I have to
>> wonder what he sees in an RPM-based distribution, because from my
>> experience they require quite a bit more hands-on, low-level
maintenance
>> than Debian based systems do (at least the package manager does).
>>     
>
> When was the last time you looked at an rpm distro?  'rpm hell' is a 
> thing of the past.
>   
    So you mean RPMs are no longer version dependent on the libgdbm ?
And that they're intelligent enough to ask appropriate questions
necessary to get a sane default configuration on install rather than
just dump some standard default configuration. Yes they've add'd the
feature to yum to be able to get dependency packages as well on install
but the format itself has not changed to the point I'd claim 'rpm hell'
is a thing of the past.
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