Re: [Computerbank] Linux distribution standardisation

[marktri <marktri@micom.asn.au>]

Hello All,

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Tony Joblin wrote:

> > I am open to consider the commercial benefits in deciding what distribution
> > to use, though at the moment I don't see the benefit in getting RedHat
> > sponsorship. I make this remark on the grounds that I don't know what
> > RedHat could possibly give us except for free support (which they normally
> > charge for) and money through advertising. I think they would be the ones
> > making out in such a deal, not us! :)
> 
> There is no reason why Computerbank and Redhat can't both arrive at a win-win 
> sponsorship deal.

There are a number of good comments, and I think that Red Hat have a lot
goingfor them. If they will sponsor, excellent. The one "feature" of
Debian that is utterly valuable is the "apt" tool set for package
management. With the RPM tools, the user has to resolve dependencies,
and first install whatever a package needs, and whatever any of that
needs before that. With Debian, apt-get is capable of automatically
handling all the dependencies.

The other issue is that of policy, as set by a distribution. The Debian
packages are, almost universally, able to be installed on any Debian
based distro. With Red Hat, there are RPM's done for other distros based
on Red Hat, but they can fail on distros other than that for which they
were built. This means that there are separate ones for SUSE, Mandrake
and so on. They can have different dependencies, and more commonly,
expect a different placement of some directories in the filesystem.

Even with the above, I still consider Red Hat to have merit, and to be
good. If the PC's have a standard configuration, then their "Kickstart"
tool is very useful, create a boot and install floppy with a kickstart
file, and the whole installation is automatick, including partitioning.
The only user action needed is swapping CD's, and a network install can
get past even that.

Regards,	Mark Trickett


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