Re: debian and RH
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?"
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