[ale] linus doesn't like Debian?

[Jeff Lightner]

You're implying there's something wrong with being a girly man?  You're
not in the Seinfeld "not that there's anything wrong with that" camp?
(For the record I'm not gay - not that there's anything wrong with
that.)

Having worked on AT&T UNIX, SCO XENIX & UNIX, NEC's Astrix, NCR UNIX,
AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Dynix and probably others I've forgotten along with
distros such as Caldera, Debian, Fedora and RedHat (not to mention
embedded Linux in NAS, BigIP F5) and Vmware not to mention various
applications and databases on enterprise class systems I think I've got
all the "technical" work I can handle.

My point was if we're just making distros for us geeks why aren't we all
just getting all the source and building from scratch?  For that matter
why aren't we all "he-men" enough to write and run our own operating
systems rather than being so namby-pamby as to rely on OSS communities?


There is nothing prohibiting anyone from downloading and compiling
source on any distro (including Fedora) and many reasons why you would
want to even if there were precompiled packages available.   My comments
about source were to point out what I saw as incongruities in the
arguments.

I don't mind folks preferring one distro over another - I do mind
opinion presented as fact especially when BS is posted about another
distro to try to support their opinion.  As I noted in my post (in upper
case no less) I knew what I was saying was "OPINION".  It just often
appears to me that some folks pretend they are posting fact when the
"fact" is that it is only their opinions.  Talking about rpm failings
from years ago as if they were the biggest impediment to Linux adoption
today ignores recent history.   This is essentially a "religious
argument" and as such won't ever be won.  (Shouting the loudest isn't a
win - it's just a recognition that you can't formulate intelligent
arguments.)

Of course my comment about Linus supporting Fedora was meant to be
tongue in cheek but that doesn't always seem apparent in text.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of John
To: ale at ale.org
Heim
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 2:05 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] linus doesn't like Debian?

From: "Jeff Lightner" <jlightner at water.com>
To: ale at ale.org
> 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 think the reference is actually to the circular dependencies problem
that 
used to be so common. I switched from Red Hat to debian a few years ago.
But 
you used to get a situation where package A would depend on B and B
would 
depnd on C and C would depend on A. Supposedly you could force it to
install 
A which would break the loop. But that didn't always work.

Friends of mine tell me that never happens any more. Besides, it can
happen 
in debian apt too. It's funny because when I first switched to debian, I
had 
way fewer problems with apt than I have had recently. Try upgrading from

sarge to etch, it is very difficult.

> 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.

Okay, girly-man. If you want to run a "non technical" distro. That's
what 
Linus said, after all. He doesn't touch the technical or compile
everything 
distros.
 :-)

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