Greg Folkert wrote:
Many reasons people come to Debian... Distributed Binaries is not one of them.
If you think this isn't a reason to use Debian, I, as a long-time user, will tell you that you're dead wrong. I use Debian because there exist packages for most every popular piece of free software out there, and I will never have to use an untrusted binary package to install it conveniently. Even when it comes to installing software that's not in the Archive, I can safely install it from source, with the assurance that none of its files will be mixed in with any files installed by the package management system (not the case with most 3rd-party RPMS).
I am doing some sysadmin work involving RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 systems, and I will tell you that they do a terrible job of maintaining a binary distribution. Standing by themself, let alone compared to Debian, they do no integration testing of the packages they release and distribute. For example, this past summer, after a new server installation, we had to build and install a local copy of Perl, because the version they distributed was completely incompatible with both mailscanner and amavisd-new due to module bugs. This sort of brown-paper-bag error in a release is unthinkable in Debian, precisely because of the QA that our exact distributed binaries go through (and this particular issue was actually caught in testing, as it should have been).
Philip Miller