[Ilugc] using RPM packages in debian
- From: binand@xxxxxxxxx (Binand Sethumadhavan)
- Date: Tue Apr 11 11:35:54 2006
On 11/04/06, Raja Subramanian <rajasuperman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Debian's strength is far beyond a fancy package manager. The advantages that
I find with Debian are:
1. Debian means quality, quality means Debian.
That is highly subjective. Are you saying that the other distros are
lacking in quality?
I can remember other Linux distros including poorly optimized math libs
that produced incorrect results, releasing unofficial versions of GCC
(remember kgcc?) and such screw ups.
Don't forget that Debian's had its own problems too. Till a few months
ago, Debian had no security advisories for months.
3. Debian is 100% volunteer driven and non-profit. Embodies the true spirit
of Open Source.
Well, if you are saying Open Source does indeed mean non-profit (ie,
no revenues, no salaries, no expenses) then yes. The rest of us can
feel hunger.
4. Liberal organizational structure. Debian elects it's project leaders in
the same way we elect our Government.
Have you seen the kind of governments we get?
5. Debian is an OS and therefore much more than just a Linux kernel and
userland. Debian runs on - Hurd, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris.
6. Runs on multiple hardware - x86, alpha, sparc, ppc, arm, etc. Other
distros have at some point dropped support for unpopular platforms (alpha,
sparc) due to lack of customer demand.
Trivia: WinNT 4.0 ran on x86, alpha and MIPS. And what remains now?
WinNT 4.0 is now retired software. But it did indeed run on x86, alpha
and MIPS until its last day.
Standardizing on the same distro on for _all_ your platforms is a
tremendous win in a medium/large environment. Training your sysadmin
staff, scripting and maintenance is so much easier.
You yourself have stated above that the other distros stopped
supporting these platforms because they lacked customer demand. I find
that the fact that Debian supports these no-demand platforms increases
its response time for software updates, new releases etc. since they
need to be tested on so many platforms.
7. Debian tools - apt, dpkg, etc. - have found their way into other systems
Eg. fink.sf.net brings Debian's tools to Mac OSX.
So what. Other distro tools have found their way into Debian too. I
think dpkg-reconfigure uses newt (or whiptail?), which is a 100%
Redhat innovation.
8. Debian developers contribute extensively to upstream code.
So does other distros. In fact, Redhat goes several steps ahead - it
contributes code, pays the bills and employs several of the upstream
developers.
9. The release streams - stable, testing, unstable - rather than versions
ensures that "stable" really does undergo thorough real-world testing.
As someone else pointed out, RHEL, Fedora and Rawhide. Just the fact
that non-Debian users aren't as vocal or boisterous as Debian users
doesn't mean that Debian's the only one with all the real-world
features.
Hmmm... Debian sounds more like a way of life (a religion?) to me.
Could be. And I pity you in the same way I pity people who consider
Sai Baba or Mata Amritanandamayi as their god or way of life or
whatever.
Binand
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