Re: Upgrade advantage in Debian vrs. RedHat

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

CaT <cat@zip.com.au> writes:

> Let me give you today's example:

Nit: your example wasn't comparing apples and apples.  You were
running an up-to-date Debian system and an old RedHat system, which
didn't ship ssh in the first place.  With a current RH system, it
would have been something like

* ftp to favorite rh mirror

* grovel through directory structure to find the 7.0 updates

* download openssh rpms

* rpm -Uvh them

This is more work than Debian, but not nearly as bad as you paint it
to be.  (You also get a much more recent version of openssh than you
would on a potato system.)  If you'd been trying this with a slink or
hamm system, would apt-get have been able to do anything?

In general, the advantages I see over redhat in terms of packaging are

* Much more packaged, and all to the same standards

* Much more likely then that anything you want will be packaged and
  upgradable automatically

* Much easier to keep packages up-to-date, since you need to do it
  yourself with rpmfind or autorpm on RH, or pay to use up2date

* Much easier to download new packages as you need them with apt-get.

All told, that means one is more likely to keep a system updated and
secure.  But please don't try to demonstrate that RH is unusable
simply because you don't know it as well as you use Debian... the
reverse could just as easily be said.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
Good day to avoid cops.  Crawl to school.