Re: Nomination question: Redhat
Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl> writes:
> > Obviously, I wish they would adopt a more open development model which has
> > the system as secure as it can be throughout their development.
> They are doing that now by making frequent snapshot releases available,
> something like our unstable tree.
Yup. The have a new version every few weeks, and it is experimental
(more so than Debian unstable. They are using glibc 2.1, 2.1 kernels,
etc, and are not afraid to break stuff in "RawHide" - they also
release for all three platforms at once.)
> > > How can we work better with them?
> [.. snip snip ..]
> > I also believe we could and should work with Redhat with big projects
> > such as a sane installation and configuration for X.
> So far it seems all distributions stick to their own installation procedures
> and very little cross-fertilizing is being done. Funnily enough I heard
> Erik Troan say during SANE that RH is going to work on their own
> configuration management system, and I've mailed him a while ago to see if
> we can work together on aspects of this (I've yet to hear anything from
> him). That might be a nice testcase to see if we can work together on
> other projects in the future. Please note that we have to be very carefull
> in common projects not to loose sight of our own needs: reducing work
> is fine, but we should not end up with a result that is less then optimal.
Currently, Red Hat is using linuxconf, judging from what I can see
from outside RedHat, I think they will head towards a Gnome "capplet"
based system. (It's a pluggable configuration panel system they
are developing for Gnome.)
Working with Red Hat would be nice. Right now, it seems that we are
on opposite sides of the ideal. Their system can be automated, and
our system does more configuration at install time. It would be nice
if we shared the same code when we eventually meet in the middle (for
config management, not necessarily package management).
I personally find Red Hat much nicer for initial installs, Debian much
nicer for upgrades. Additionally, there are many more packages in
Debian. (The third party RPMS don't count because of the quality.)
Red Hat's source packaging is much nicer. The multiple original
tar.gz and multiple patches are wonderful. (I'm porting sparc32
Debian to the Ultra and I've found the separate patches very useful
when building the X server and binutils - see the sparc list for more
info.)
Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu
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