[geeks] Solaris 9/x86 Performance

[Frank Van Damme]

On Wednesday 15 January 2003 15:52, sammy ominsky wrote:
> On Wednesday, Jan 15, 2003, at 09:21 US/Eastern, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> > Imho, package management is the main selling point for a distribution
> >
> > :-)
>
> As my high-school math teacher used to say "You have a right to your
> opinion, but you're wrong".
>
> 8-)

:)

> There are minor differences between the various linux distributions
> that make people prefer one over the other, but As Far As I Know,
> nobody LOVES RPM enough to choose Red Hat just for it.

Since there are about 30 other distributions who use rpm? It's a reason to not
recommend slackware to anyone starting linux for instance.

> I think at this point, it's all dependent on ease-of-use. The
> distribution with the simplest install wins. When I need a box up and
> running, I want to know I can just slip in my cd (regardless of who
> made it), fill in a few blanks, and go.

Sounds a bit too simple to me.

> If, on the other hand, you have the time, energy and know-how, there
> are a dozen other optioons out there to allow you to build the system
> YOU want, with literally any level of ease or difficulty you want. None
> of them are consistent with any of the others as to package manager.
> One that's become insanely popular among the local linux geeks is
> gentoo, which uses no package manager at all. 'Splain that? And
> Slackware?

See above, hehe... btw gentoo HAS a package manager, and dependencies. It's
called portage. But it still has a long way to go. It is one of the reasons I
don't run gentoo. pe it won't protest if you try to de-install a package, on
which an other package depends. The reason people (distributions!) use rpm
(or dpkg for that matter) is that it is generally stable (don't shoot, it
seems that all bsd lovers shoot at rpm because it's so flaky, I think they're
just jealous because THEY don't have a decent package management system :-) )
and while you may have a bad experience, my package system is one of the few
things I didn't screw up yet. I cannot recall ever having suffered from bugs
in those programs (having used Mandrake, which is rpm-based, and debian for
nearly 3 years now).

You can't go without a package manager, how crappy even. Compiling everything
by hand (=not with ports or anything) could make a fulltime job. Not to
mention dependency hell. I don't know about Solaris, but I used openbsd for a
while, and I once installed a small slackware somewhere - there are 2 package
managers worth that name, namely rpm and dpkg. The rest is childish nonsense.
Ugh!

> Anyway, who am I to talk? I have one linux box at home, and it's
> running Red Hat 6.2 /SPARC.

I am running Debian, and you are running a very old version of Red hat.

> ---sambo
> on a Mac

--
Frank
on a borrowed PC