> Hey don't get me wrong - I wasn't talking about debian as a whole, just > that IMO - the installation isn't as good as redhat's and that it should > be possible to do something about it. I bought a new hard drive, so I just installed Red Hat and FreeBSD here (no, I'm not switching). I was quite impressed by Red Hat's installation process - very straight forward, and they ask the bare minimum of questions. It's pretty good-looking too. I had to give up on doing an NFS install though - but that might just be because I didn't set up my NFS server correctly (I had to restart every time it didn't work). Their networking setup was really good - but their disk partitioning setup wasn't as easy for a newbie. FreeBSD in comparison was really frustrating - the kernel on the setup disk wouldn't boot on my machine. I ended up installing their development boot disk instead. Then it was fairly straight forward. I found their disk partitioning stuff to be really confusing too. Everybody's installation procedure asks way too many questions, but I guess that's the way it goes... > Now, talking about debian as a whole, the other point I want to make is > that debian is a bit too integrated - that is - the required base of > packages is large making a "minimum" install of debian too large for some > uses. Maybe better use of dependencies will fix this. I don't think the > package-system should require anything but libc and libdb. If you want an > interface, require curses, svgalib or xbase, but separate these interfaces > from the dpkg* command-line programs. Perl et.al. shouldn't be required > IMO, and dependencies on gcc is definitively not good. I don't even think > dpkg should require libg++, but I'll accept it :). I agree mostly, the Debian base system isn't as clean and as optimized as it could be. But at least it's powerful. :-) > Is it a goal for debian not to require perl? I don't think so - and that > is one of the things I don't like with debian. It seems that debian is > infested with perlism. There are "smart" perl-scripts doing all sorts of > things. All those scripts are helping out with basic system administration. I think that's a good thing. There's a lot of stuff there that I wouldn't want to see written in 'C' or a shell script. Perl is a good choice. And I don't really see it as a security hole (at least the non-suid version). Running a system without compilers and interpreters just seems a little bit too much like the Microsoft style of doing things. And if someone's trying to break your system - that fact that you don't have these compilers and interpreters installed is only going to slow them down, not stop them (only good security will do that). Cheers, - Jim
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