On 06-Nov-03, Matt Temple wrote: > I think time will tell how well and if YUM or APT-RPM will > make it there. up2date, while a big improvement on ... uh ... > nothing, would often choke if I had done any "non-standard" > installations and claim that package this or that needed to be > removed when I couldn't even find it. These things are often > a matter of habit. I got used to rpm. Strangely, there's > a little lurking thingie that goes off when looking at > Debian -- sort of like "it's too easy. It must not be taking > something into account." Debian's package management system does work extremely well, and I agree it's hard to shake off the fear. :-) A colleague of mine found a really nice example of how sensible apt/dpkg is the other week, when he discovered that when you upgrade a package, the first thing that happens is that Debian tries to run the pre-rm script for the installed package. If that fails, rather than abort the upgrade, it runs the pre-rm script from the *new* package, which it hasn't installed yet, and continues the installation if that succeeds. That gives the package maintainer a really simple way of fixing brokenness in existing installed versions of his/her package; just issue a new package with a pre-rm script which knows about the problems in the old script, and apt will sort it out. > I don't want to encourage divisions here. Since I wouldn't like to see > there to be the One True Linux, I think we'll probably be looking > at Red Hat, Fedora, Suse, and Debian and (throw in some other > favorites.) I find that people wind up comfortable and competent > in the distro they've used most. Actually, I've probably used Red Hat more than anything else (certainly on more machines, if not for a longer length of time), but I'm most comfortable with Debian. I agree it's good to avoid monoculture. My main concern is that most distributions lack ISV support. I would like to encourage distributions to do what Platform Computing do, which is to support a particular kernel/C library version combination, which is a rather more sensible approach. Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK