Re: debian and RH

["David Z. Maze" <dmaze@donut.mit.edu>]

Ben Cornett <acornet@emory.edu> writes:
BC> A number of you have offhandedly remarked that you believe Debian
BC> to be technically superior to the RH distribution.  I was
BC> wondering if anyone would care to elaborate on that a bit for me.

-- Debian packages only depend on other packages.  AFAICT RPM has this 
   weird provides/depends thing, where a package in theory "provides"
   itself and every file in it, and other packages depend on something 
   the package provides.  This means that packages can do unuseful
   things like depend on /bin/sh, and then lose if no packages is
   actually providing it.

-- Debian maintained backwards compatability across the libc5 -> glibc 
   upgrade.  Red Hat didn't.  Library building problems that Debian
   was in the process of fixing when I first installed it close to two 
   years ago are still unresolved in Red Hat.

-- There's a single canonical location for Debian packages, and
   they'll all work on your system.  The only things that don't seem
   to be in the main archive are alpha versions of major bits of
   Debian (e.g. GNOME-APT).

-- APT.  Automatic dependency checking in general (which dselect does, 
   but less well).

-- A conspicuous lack of packages that install themselves under /opt
   or /usr/local.  Well-defined packaging standards that are actually
   adhered to.

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/
"Hey, Doug, do you mind if I push the Emergency Booth Self-Destruct Button?"
"Oh, sure, Dave, whatever...you _do_ know what that does, right?"