Re: Back to RedHat
On 24 Sep 1998, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> [this is not a flame or rant, even though it will seem to be]
Don't get me wrong, I think you guys are doing great work, and so far I like
debian better than redhat (on the sucktel system I have), I was just trying
to make some hopefully helpful suggestions...I can still play with .deb
stuff on a redhat install.
On the diversity of packages issue, I agree, diversity of packages is good.
But it just seemed to me that everyone is trying their hardest to get every
package under the sun into the archive, without worrying about whether they
work or install properly. (lesstif, gtk being the biggest culprits).
I guess the major problem I had was that I tried to install too much. I
should have installed the absolute base minimum system and then
incrementally added packages. As it was, with too many things installed,
many of them broken...things all went to hell rather quickly.
The *reason* I tried to install too much was that when going through dselect
initially I noticed that the base setup didn't contain many essential
utilities (though I can't remember which, networking stuff, I think).
> It just is one of the differences in the systems... RH thinks there way is "The
> Right Way" (probably tm), SlackWare have there, which they think is "The Right
> Way To Go" (probably tm to :), and we, Debian have our way...
But of course. Why do anything you don't think is right? ;)
> > > 2) Few (if any) duplicate functionality packages. For instance, Debian
> > > comes with like 7 mail-delivery-agents. What's with that? To a new user,
> > > it's not clear which is best, and at times, even that you can only choose
>
> Now this point was the one that really got me! DIVERSITY!!
As I recall, there were several "sets" of preselected packages.
Workstation, network server, print server, etc... I needed functionality
from several of these, and had to select packages by hand. *that's* where
the difficulty started.
> If you don't like DIVERSITY, freedom of choice, maybe you should stick with M$?
> They will ram there OS down your trough, and you don't have any thing to say
> about that.
> > > *one*. Also, there are 3 different mutually exclusive ways to install the
> > > gtk libs. (???)
>
> So? It's gets installed, right? Isn't that what you wanted? Why should it matter
> that it can be installed in '3 different mutually exclusive ways'?
gnome has its gtk libs (which it depends on). gtk1.1 is there too.
selecting just one of them was a pain since anytime I selected any package
that depended on gtk it brought up the annoying little help screen followed
by dependency info. I'd suggest only bringing up *unresolved* dependency
info.
> > > 3) Whittle down the number of packages. At last count the main tree had
> > > 1713 packages in it. It takes many hours to sift through that list and
> > > decide what to install. And after doing so, you simply can't remember all
> > > the "neato" little things you installed. I saw mention recently of trying
> > > to keep up with the intel side of .deb's. Forget about it. Their community
> > > is much larger and they will always churn out new stuff faster than us. Go
> > > for a smaller set of stable packages instead of the latest whiz-bang stuff.
>
> Ahh... Here it is again... I think I've said enough about this issue... Use M$
> if you don't like freedom of choice... Even RH/SW have a lot of packages.
Maybe I should reword that. Whittle down the number of packages in the
*base*. Put the rest in contrib.
> > > 6) dselect needs a major overhaul. Its key mappings are non-intuitive and
> >
> > You should take a look at apt.
>
> As he said, this is also worked on. The apt crew have done quite a nice piece of
> software here, and it's being continusly improved...
Hmmm...I selected it when I installed, but it didn't get installed...I tried
to run it once or twice... ???
> -- Microsoft: Do less with more. UNIX on Intel: Do more with less. --
^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
;) I love linux. Why I bought an alpha. ;)
Ok, so the next time I mail to this list it'll be something useful, instead
of a bunch of bitching. ;)
-- Bob
./'^`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'#`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'^`\.
/ Rube Goldberg? Bah! Amateur! I give you..Windows 98! Linux everywhere \
| Linux, because everyone's work is mission critical. ANYTHING inside. |
|_Bob McElrath (mcelrath@wisconsin.cern.ch) Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison_|
\.___________________________________________________________________./
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