On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 10:46:25AM -0600, Kent Schumacher (kent at structural-wood.com) wrote: > David Phillips wrote: > >Kent Schumacher writes: > >>Note that apt is not a sufficient answer - apt4rpm seems to have > >>addressed that issue pretty well. > > > >Debian is not about apt-get. Debian was around for years before apt-get > >existed. Debian is about free software, distributed as high quality > >packages that meet strict guidelines. Having an easy way to automatically > >install software is merely a feature that the packaging system allows. > > > It seems to me that the central statement 'Debian is about free software, > distributed as high quality packages that meet strict guidelines' is also > true of RedHat. This is not entirely true. Redhat very frequently packages software the is not ready to go out, and they send it to production systems (I think many people will remember the whole gcc thing a while back). The complaint many people have about debian stable is its "out of date" but that is because a package needs to prove that there are no problems with it. There are little things that sometimes slip through, but they have a much better track record than any other distro I know. > As someone who is also trying to steer a course through an unknown future, > I'm honestly interested in why you are recommending Debian, so much so that > you stated 'You will wish you had switched years ago'. What is the big > attraction that Debian has? One thing I really like about it is the number of packages it has in its repository. Sure, there is apt4rpm, but you are still left searching for packages elsewhere, or compiling them yourself. It has many, many alternatives for the same functionality in lots of cases. Of course, if you dont care about having those choices (and there are a lot of desktop users who dont) then the whole apt repository for debian becomes a burden (too many choices). Jay -- Jay Kline http://www.slushpupie.com _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list