Unfortunate articles

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 8/19/05, Marc Wiriadisastra <marc.w at smlintl.com.au> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have been reading up on fedoraforums and I found some interesting
> links to articles.
> 
> http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=article-rpm

I think perhaps that author needs to get acquinted with the kinds of
problems debian users had with upgrades to the newest "stable" release
of debain which came out recently and then write a more balanced
article based on reality.
For reference:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00006.html

There is no silver bullet when it comes to cross-distro
incompatibility either. Thanks to the popularity of Ubuntu.. you are
going to see more 'incompatible' deb packages as ubuntu diverges away
from debian stable. There will be situations where some packages will
be debian specific some will be ubuntu specific simply because of the
timescales associated with each projects development and the changes
they need to incorporate to meet their guiding priorities. The debian
ecosystem of distributions is not immune to the problem of
incompatible divergence.

As for gentoo.. well once you attempt to compile X or openoffice on
middle of the road hardware.. you'll quickly see how much coffee
you'll end up drinking if you attempt to install and maintain gentoo
on a number of machines. Its cute..but it doesn't scale very well. If
everyone rolled their own binaries and drank coffee waiting for the
results.. we'd quickly run out of coffee. And I NEED my coffee for
more important endeavors.  In fact I need my coffee so much, that I
plan to hunt down and exterminate gentoo users who are wasting such a
valuable resource, squandering it while they replicate compiles of
upgrades across systems.

-jef"its very easy to promise a smooth upgrade...its much harder to
state a modest truth. Unfortunately a lot a people seem to value an
overreaching promise over honesty nowadays"spaleta