On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:56:16PM +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Ubuntu - desktop Debian - server or desktop
Debian upgrades very nicely, I've never used Redhat and don't intend to until I hear that "dependancy hell" has been resolved.
James.
_______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior
Personally I've never had a problem with package dependencies. Other than a very trivial amount of annoyance that some things on my server require Xlibs to be installed. Mainly because things, like ImageMagick, have X11 components to them when they can otherwise be used in a headless environment. The problem of dependencies is not restricted to Redhat. It is rather more to do with the way Unix/Linux applications are built with things like auto{make,conf}. When you run configure before you build an application it checks to see what libraries and what not are installed and builds a binary around those discoveries. Not all configure scripts are created equal. Depending on the source code and developers you may or may not be able to build parts of an application without the X11 libs or some other library dependency (via switches to configure). To run the compiled app you need to have the libs it linked against during the build, otherwise it will not start. Those libs are provided by package X, so you package Y has to have the package dependency of X. X in turn might depend on Z and so on. This is normal. This is how all Linux packaging systems work. The criticism that can probably be justly leveled at RedHat is purely a matter of granularity. RedHat has historically only split packages into 3 groups, base, base-devel, base-libs. Eg, cups, cups-devel, cups-libs. Over time, and subsequent distro releases, some packages have been split (where they can be) into smaller chunks, eg php which has some of its extensions split out into separate dynamically loaded modules. But to do this required frucking about with the way php is built. Even PHP which is designed to have dynamically loaded extensions requires jumping through hoops to make it build right in a modular fashion. So, basically the only way to get packages with less dependencies is to create them with a finner granularity. Which means more packages. Which also means much more work building package scripts and testing them. It may also mean writing patches to applications so that they can be built in a more modular way. Not all apps are as good as Apache when it comes to building extensions. Some applications rely entirely on what they 'discover' during the running of configure. To avoid these discoveries would require building entire build environments around those specific applications and each specific module, or creating huge patches which fundamentally change the way an application is built. RedHat has historically gone with the thinking, more packages == more work, more debugging, and slower releases. Therefore lets create less packages and do it faster. Just look a the glacial pace of development in the Debian world for proof. I personally am perfectly happy to install a bunch of extra packages, when necessary, to get things to work. Especially now when we have groovy tools like apt and yum to solve and download all the dependencies for us. So stop bitching and actually give Fedora/RedHat (or any other RedHat derived distro) a try. Regards On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 10:42 +1200, James Clark wrote: oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com