Oliver Jones wrote:
/When I ran Redhat, I was constantly irriated by having to find packages and installing them manually. Debian was great because I no longer hand to go and find all the stuff I needed, and keep it up to date with respect to security fixes./
To a certain extent Fedora is making this better. With a select few yum/apt repositories you get the same effect. Obviously if there is no repository for an app then it can be more involved to install. Fedora certainly doesn't have the depth of apps that debian enjoys yet. But this is purely a community size thing. The more people who join the Fedora (and related) packaging efforts the more packages there will be.
Having a distribution that has a "base", and several add on "repositories" that you could mix and match from would be very nice, although I'm not entirely sure how practical it would be given that you'd end up back in dependancy hell, except instead of having dependancy problems with individual packages, I've not got them between repositories (if I have say "base" + "Gnome" + "KDE", then if Gnome wants a newer version of some X library and KDE doesn't, then I'm hosed.)
/People say that Linux has a "dependancy hell" of trying to find the dependancies/versions for software that you want to install. These people must be running slackware or fedora where you don't have the huge package base to install from. In Debian if I needed to install the Redland RDF Parser, apt-get would install it, and all of it's dependancies, and then if a security flaw is found, it will be updated. Under Redhat (and now Fedora), anything extra I have to find and manage myself./
Not entirely true anymore. But the more off the beaten track you go this still tends to be the case. It's pretty rare now days that I go looking too far afield for apps I want on my desktop.
Ahh yes. Now, I don't care much about my desktop. I want xterms, mozilla, xchat, tkabber and something to play music (rythymbox/xmms/whatever). What I do care about is libraries for things I want to code for, and (mostly networking) programs. I've never really found Redhat to be anywhere near useful for this.
One of the more irritating things I find is the general lack of willingness from app developers to plug into common distributions in a sane fashion. The quality of rpm packaging by software developers leaves something to be desired in many cases.
I've only once or twice had people ask if I've got an "rpm" for a program I wrote. Almost always they want it for mandrake (?) and for software I've got .spec files for, noone has ever commented on their quality (or at least, hasn't mentioned it to me). I'm also not particularly amused with the idea of having to package the same software for Debian/Redhat/Mandrake/slackware/SUSE/etc. I package for what I use, if people want to package for other distros and send me a diff, I'm more than happy to include it. Noone has seriously complaind about this approach (other than people saying "You should package for other distros!" on princple). Mostly this is because, I suspect, I write software that people tend to want to compile from hand anyway.