Re: Debian and Redhat - are most linux users missing the point?
On Sun, 28 Feb 1999, George Bonser wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Feb 1999, King Lee wrote:
>
> > Sorry, bad choice of words. I hope that if debian gains "market share"
> > Red Hat may not be so dominant.
>
> Well, I am not sure that Red Hat being so dominant is anything Debian can
> change unless they want to get closer to commercial software vendors which
> is not exactly their goal. There IS room for a commercial distribution
> BASED on Debian that might be able to penetrate the business market (where
> the vast majority of installed platforms are).
I hope that some company "gets close to commerial software vendors"
and distributes Debian (or at least use dpkg). This would be
good for everyone because it gives users choice of dpkg or rpm
>
> > If Slackware gained market share at
> > the expence of Red Hat, that would be equally good in my eyes. Not
> > that I have anything against Red Hat, but as I said in my original
> > post I am troubled by one distro becoming so dominant.
>
> Slackware MIGHT be able to do it but without a decent package tool, I
> doubt it since Corel is not exactly going to ship you their source for
> compiling on your system and there is little configuration control with
> Slack. As a matter of fact, this is how both Debian and Red Hat evolved
> ... making a standard configuration with a decent package manager
> originally based on Slackware.
>
> Were you a Linux user back when Slackware (or SLS) was the ONLY
> distribution? Corel has now announced that they are going to produce
> their own distribution. That might put a bit of a hurt on Red Hat.
>
I don't see why Slackware doesn't adopt dpkg (or rpm). I did use it
a long, long time ago - I learned alot.
I didn't know that Corel will produce another distribution - I hope
that they base it on Red Hat or Debian. We do not need another
file system layout - that makes it harder for software developers
to produce software that runs on all forms of Linux (and BSD, and Irix,
and ...). I hope all distributions settle on one file system and
one packaging tool (I prefer dpkg); the distributions can differ
on adminstrative tools glint versus dselect. Different packaging
tools and file layouts hurt Linux where it is weakest (IMHO): getting
getting commercial software developers to for Linux.
King Lee
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