Fedora Extras is extra

[John Summerfield]

On Thursday 02 December 2004 11:07, Erik Kjær Pedersen wrote:
> and they sort of did the same in the
> redhat line, but that is hopefully being filled in by fedora.

That was about when I switched to Debian.

> I am not going to go away from repositories that have proved to be
> trustworthy to become more dependent on a company that has proved not to be
> completely trustworthy at least.

Debian has its advantages: name a package and it's probably packaged and you 
can get it from your primary supplier.

Some of you know about apt-get already; its big advantage to me over up2date 
(yum wasn't here when I changed) is that it's easily configured to pull from 
my local (I can visit them) mirror.

A disadvantage of Debian, and it's a serious one, is that release cycles are 
somewhat long and eratic. Consequently, people package new stuff for Stable 
(currently Woody), and link from apt-get.org.

Ignoring the possibilities of incompetance or even dishonesty amongst those 
helpers, there's no good way to be sure of where your packages come from: 
apt-get defaults to treating all sources as equal and chooses the latest 
version. It can be configured otherwise, but that's not widely known.

There is also backports.org which manages stuff more sanely: each package has 
its own repository.

> I typically start using a new repository when there is some program, I can
> not find another place. I have once used a repository that I found to be a
> little to experimantal for my taste so I backed out of it again.
> The "don't mix repositories" website is in some sense saying "Trust us, not
> them", but they have not given us a real good reason for that so far.

Debian sorta sorts this out by having stable (security updates and no others 
no matter what), testing (no security updates but probably as stable as FC 
from what I've seen recently), sid (still in development - get the idea?) 
and, ahem, experimental.

apt-get chooses the line of software you've configured, and currently Sarge 
has some 13000 or so packages. And your Sun, Alpha, MIPS etc machines are all 
equally supported. Until recently I was using an old Powermac as my firewall 
running Woody, postfix, shorewall etc.

If you're happy to run Sarge (and most longterm debian users seem to be, at 
least for their desktops) then there's not much need for third-party 
packages, and everything fits because everything's built on Debian's build 
farm.

OTOH Debian historically has had a pretty gruesome installer (at least I 
thought so until I tried assorted BSDs and Darwin), and I'm not yet persuaded 
by its new installer which is running late for Woody.

Debian's deficiencies are
a) Lack of management that can set end enforce deadlines
b) Lack of management that can set and enforce service standards
and the like

There are lots of Debian Developers who listen to their users and help sort 
out the bugs (and I have filed a few); there are some a little less so.

Debian's advantages are
a) Larger set of software (they've never heard of commercial realities)
b) Better integration of less commonly-used software.

RH/FC advantages as I seen them rn:
Better polish.
More recent software (I have KDE 3.2 and Gnome 2.6)

Now, Debian seems prone to forking. Lots of people have seen Knoppix which is 
built on Debian using some RH tools.
There's also Mepis which is sort of a proper distro, not quite like Knoppix. 
It installs a KDE desktop and looks quite nice.

More importantly there is Ubuntu. Canonical (the company behind it) hashired 
some Debian Developers who've taken Gnome 2.8 from Sid, a 2.6.8 or so kernel 
and some other stuff (including debian-installer) and created a one-CD 
distro. Installing it is a doddle - about three questions then it trundles 
away for a while copying the CD to the hard drive.

root is disabled by default. The first user account is configured into sudo as 
being able to do everything after entering his own password.

It's free. I've got a stack of 20 official CDs to give away. They cost me 
nothing.
It's on a six-monthly release cycle. October and April.
Free support (think RHL) for 18 months.

I've already mentioned elsewhere that a lot of the developers have Thinkpads. 
A lot have Macs too, so they know how OS X works. When I plug my camera into 
my Powerbook Iphoto pops up. When I plug it into my wife's computer GTK-Thumb 
pops up.

It's got pretty much all of Debian available to it, but only the standard set 
has official support. Sadly for me. KDE is not part of the standard set.


atm I'm taking a look at nahant and FC to see what's changed, whether FC meets 
my (changed) requirements better than Debian does.

I'm a little bemused by this debate on third-party repositories. OTOH I've not 
followed it closely, too much name-calling for my liking.

I'd have thought a sensible rule would be
_nobody_ creates packages that RH might create. It seems to me some kind of 
naming rule, enforced (or at least recognised) by rpm would help here.
If _I_ for some reason want to package an enhanced glibc I might call it 
glibc-jcs (with matching version number), and say it supercedes glibc and 
provides glibc.

Now, if someone wants to revert to the official glibc then that has to be 
possible too.

Anaconda might need some work too. I'm not sure that replacing glibc like this 
is very sensible, but sendmail or postfix are different matters.

Possibly Anaconda would need to calculate dependencies to test whether a 
proposed upgrade is possible, and allow users to adjust package selections as 
needed.



-- 

Cheers
John Summerfield
tourist pics: http://environmental.disaster.cds.merseine.nu/