Re: Woody vs. Sarge vs. You've heard this before ;-)
On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 01:01:51AM -0400, Aaron wrote:
> On -2471-Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 06:28:50PM -0500, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> spake thus,
> > My mixed sarge/sid system has worked very well for me, with minimal,
> > surmountable issues. Certainly less than I had when trying to
> > upgrade RPM-based systems.
>
> This is a repeated reply, but I had to add that I actually have an
> RPM-based system (it's RedHat Valhalla, or 7.3 for the
> digit-using-folk), and I must admit that the RPM format is an
> admirably HORRIBLE package management system. Unless you really want
> to use RPM for EVERYTHING (and that's really hard to do on a desktop
> machine where you need... Hmm... Flexibility?), your dependencies
> immediately get screwed up, not to mention RPMs thinking they're
> installed when they're not and not letting you uninstall them. In my
> experience, it's a mess.
>
> I love Debian.
Let me tell everyone a bit about how I started to use debian. I used
redhat for some years, doing no upgrades, just downloading new versions
and doing a reinstall. Actually upgraded someones system one time, took
a _very_ long time. Sucked after that. Anyway, I started to dislike it
more and more and did the linux-from-scratch thing. That was nice, but
if something broke, it was hard to set it up again. With my battery
doing strange things, I had some hard power downs and that wasn't too
good for my ext2 system. I couldn't really upgrade unless I recompiled
everything, so my system became less and less stable. Then I decided
that I would be better off building my own distro. I would _know_ what
was were and why, and I would learn a lot. I used RPM for packaging
(didn't know debian or APT even existed, really). I was almost done
running a server-like environment (I won't tell you how much time it
cost me) and it was rather clean. Then, I finally got fed up with rpm.
Building packages for it is a PITA. Googling I found debian, read up on
dpkg and instantly liked it, especially with that fakeroot thingy. So I
downloaded them, tried to compile and run them. Lucky for me, I had some
strange errors running fakeroot (my makefile wouldn't run as root,
mysteriously) and I decided to download debian, run dpkg under debian
and check what was wrong with my system. So I downloaded it, installed
it on some (small) partition, was not entirely impressed by the
installer, but _was_ impressed by the system. Needed some time to
adjust, but let's say I decided to throw an awful-lot-of-months of work
out of the window and wipe my hard drive clean and use debian all in two
days. Thanks for saving me, ;-)
David
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