Re: RPM

[Leslie Mikesell <les@Mcs.Net>]

> > I think the answers to these questions are serious enough to decide
> > whether Debian linux will grow or die.
> 
> Actually, they are serious enough to decide if some number of people will
> remove Debian from their systems and replace it with something else before
> the Debian maintainers themselves become interested enough in these issues
> to change them. Debian has reached the point where its growth does not hinge
> upon technical features like the ones above so much as its user and
> developer community.

I'd say the more immediate problem has to do with ease of initial
installation and security issues.  I'm still undecided as to which
of RedHat or Debian to use on several machines currently running
a hand-updated Slackware and I'm holding off because the filesystem
layout, ndbm differences, etc. will make it difficult to switch
later.  There are several things I don't like about RedHat, but
the install is a breeze and shadow password support happens with
a single command (and most sites running INN had their non-shadowed
password files mailed off to an attacker not long ago).  So far I
haven't gotten dselect to complete an install command over NFS
without giving up with too many errors (but perhaps something is
wrong with my mirrored copy) and I can't tell what you have to do to
get shadow support built into everything that needs it.  If I get
past these problems and it isn't harder than maintaining Slackware
by hand I can probably deal with anything else.

Les Mikesell
  les@mcs.com