Some thoughts about yum and repositories

[Timothy Murphy]

Beartooth wrote:

> And it is getting back, whether because of any efforts of mine, or
> independently of them, or despite them. Linux has been getting more
> user-friendly by leaps and bounds in my time.

Really?
In my experience it has been getting steadily worse.

> For example, the user I know best never managed to get RH 6.0 nor 6.1
> installed at all; had to have a Friendly Local Alpha Geek (FLAG) install
> 7.2; participated (a little) in installing 8.0 at an installfest;
> installed RH9 at home, with help from the local LUG; and has installed FC1
> twice, with a lot of help from the local LUG the first time, and with only
> a (relatively) little trouble the second. Everything works on one machine,
> and most things do on the other.

Again, my experience is exactly the opposite.
RH-8.0 installed on all my computers, without any major problems,
as did earlier RH distributions.

The kernel in RH-9.0 did not run on my SCSI-only machine,
and neither has any Fedora version since.

X11 has always worked for me on all my machines, until Fedora-2,
when the change to Xorg meant it no longer ran on my Sony Picturebooks.
(I had to re-compile X after applying patches in the Xorg bugzilla,
which for some reason were completely ignored for 6 months.)

> All this in a matter of five or six years is real progress, however
> frustrating it does get at times.

As I said, my experience is exactly the opposite.
I have some doubts about the direction of the Fedora project.
Basically, testing out new ideas for Redhat,
and trying to make a solid system,
may be contradictory.

I used to give out Redhat CDs to students,
but I'd be reluctant to give out Fedora CDs,
as I suspect I would be inundated with problems.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland