well since Gavin asks...

Pete Osborn covered some of the cool stuff about Debian already, let me
mention some issues that hit both of them, namely breaking dependencies
by building source outside of the RPM or DEB system, this will mess up
the database that tracks everything, so if you want to build source
properly, you should create a package of it, either DEB or RPM and then
install it.

Where DEB basically has three flavors, stable, testing and unstable,
with RPM things change with each distro and version.  That means an RPM
package built for RedHat 7.1 will likely not work with RedHat 7.2 and
almost certainly not work with SuSE 7.3, etc.  This problem has gotten
significantly worse in the last 2 years since RedHat 6.2 was the
standard and is a nightmare for software suppliers, so we tend to just
make tarballs now and link in everything we need.

Now Gavin just used up2date from RedHat, and that's great, but it's only
going to work for RedHat, SuSE has something similar, but near as
extensive, but if you are running SuSE then up2date doesn't do you any
good.  The biggest issue with most of these services is that they don't
really include *everything*, for example SuSE does not update your KDE
desktop with their tools, but apt-get for Debian will.  With Debian
there is just a huge number of volunteers who package up everything
that's laying around and make it available, as a package management
system Debian with apt-get is just amazing.

With all that said (and I'm just a recent convert to Debian myself after
numerous frustrations with ever major distro for the last year) Debian
is a nightmare to install.  Storm and Corel had great distros based on
Debian, but they are both gone now.  Next month i believe that Xandros
(www.xandros.com) will be releasing their new Debian based distro that
they bought from Corel.  On paper it looks fantastic at the moment, but
I guess we'll see.

Shawn

On Friday, December 7, 2001, at 10:09 AM, Gavin Scott wrote:

> Richard writes:
>> OK, now you Linux guys have to explain what's so bad about RPM? From
>> what
>> I've seen so far, it seems like a godsend compared to swinstall and
>> even
>> patch/ix.
>
> Darned if I know.  I've played with Debian but have mostly spent time
> with
> RedHat which uses (and invented) the RPM package system, and maybe
> apt-get
> is better in some way, but I have a hard time imagining how it could be
> much
> better (maybe Shawn can enlighten us).
>
> The software and patch management under the better Linux distributions
> can
> be really nice if you're used to other operating systems.  RedHat's
> "Red Hat
> Network" for managing your Linux installations is also quite impressive.
>
> I can go to the RHN web site and see all of the packages that I have
> installed on my Linux box that have updates available, and I can even
> click
> a button on their web site and my Linux system will update itself!
> There's
> a daemon you run on RedHat that checks in to the RHN server every hour
> to
> see if there's anything available for it to do, so, if you want to, you
> can
> configure the machine to be self-patching and self-upgrading!
>
> Yesterday I brought my virtual RedHat box up to the latest version of
> all
> packages by just typing "up2date -u" at a root shell prompt.  Half an
> hour
> later it was all done, no reboot required, all new packages active with
> subsystems stopped and started automatically as required.  I then did an
> "up2date -uf" to "force" the remaining available updates that did not
> qualify by default (the latest kernel) and it downloaded and installed
> the
> latest kernel and kernel source code.  I later rebooted and was
> presented at
> boot time with a menu letting me pick whether I wanted to boot the old,
> the
> new, or a debug version of either installed kernel.
>
> Quite a bit different from HP-UX or MPE.
>
> I'm sure it could be hellish if it ever screws up horribly, and the
> idea of
> configuring it to install updates to packages on its own at any time
> would
> probably not be something a sane person would do on a production box,
> but
> it's very impressive when it works (which it always has so far).
>
> It isn't always obvious from RedHat's marketing information, but the
> Red Hat
> Network service is *free* for one system per user.  Beyond that they
> charge
> somewhere between $10 and $20 per month (per system) for the service of
> keeping track of what versions of each package you have installed and
> the
> automatic download and install process.  I think this is a worthwhile
> service which is well implemented, and this is a good way for an "Open
> Source" company to make money, IMHO.  You can always search for
> applicable
> updates yourself and manually download them and then feed them to RPM,
> but
> RHN makes it very painless.
>
> If a critical security notice comes out for something I have installed,
> RedHat can send me an email notification.  If I don't have the package
> in
> question installed, or I already have a fixed version then they will
> know
> this and not waste my time with an alert.  This makes it easier to pay
> attention to the alerts that do get sent out.
>
> There may be other Linux distributions where you can do approximately
> the
> same thing for free without the fancy web site and the proactive
> notifications from RedHat based on precisely what versions of stuff you
> have
> installed.
>
> In general the things that the RPM software package management system
> does
> (completely independent from the RedHat Network service) are very
> cool.  You
> can ask RPM exactly what versions of what packages are installed at any
> time, you can point to any file on the system and ask "what package did
> this
> file come from", you can ask rpm to validate the checksum on every file
> from
> a package to ensure that that package is installed and not corrupt, and
> you
> can even do this for every package on the system at once (ideal for the
> neurotic system manager who always wants something he can run to check
> that
> the system is ok).
>
> So maybe the apt-get or some other package management system is somehow
> ten
> times better than RPM, but RPM is 1,000 times better than what I'm used
> to,
> so I'm not in a big hurry to look for something better.
>
> G.
>
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