[wellylug] Debian vs Debian Woody

[Bret Comstock Waldow]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 16:23, David Antliff wrote:

> It's more to do with the dependencies of a package. Say that your bleeding
> edge package ABCD requires a newer version of, say, glibc to work, so you
> upgrade glibc, then find that packages JKL and XYZ also require upgrading
> to work with the new glibc. This ends up pulling in lots of packages and
> you're no longer running Woody any more. Welcome to Sid.

<snip>

> If you stick with packages that are built against Woody's library set, you
> won't have these problems, but good luck finding those.

All this fits my experience, too.  You can run Woody with backports, but you 
are at the mercy of the people who assemble the backports - they often 
provide what everyone wants, and that satisfies most people.

There is the same issue in RPM based distros, which I avoid after several 
years of experience with SuSE and Red Hat and RPM hell.  You get what they 
offer, otherwise you're on your own.  Tools such as urpmi, etc. do ease the 
problem of working out the dependencies, but someone still has to have 
assembled the package that can be used with your system.  Note that the mere 
existence of add-ons like urpmi point to the inadequacies of the rpm approach 
as implemented.

I run Gentoo, as I like that everything (can be) compiled to fit my system and 
it's package dependencies.  Note in passing that Gentoo can be installed from 
packages, so getting a running system is possible in an hour or so.

But I recommend Debian variants to most people - Xandros for non-techies, 
Woody for servers (we use it at work), Libranet, others I haven't used.

I used Libranet for a while specifically because it's a paid distro, and 
therefore someone is looking after it.  But there are vibrant communities 
around free distros too, like (apparently) Ubuntu, and Debian itself.

Debian has great package breadth, and their package system works wonderfully.  
I just spent the weekend finding mySQL & JBoss packages for Red Hat 
Enterprise AS 3 (customer demand) in versions that fit our software's 
dependencies - miserable.  You get what they give you & tough if you don't 
like it.  As always with RPM based distros, I've ended up going outside the 
package system to get what I needed.

I'd advise you return to the basics - what do you want to do?  Then you can 
check if that's available.   www.backports.org and www.apt-get.org let you 
browse to see what's around packaged for which Debian versions.

Package availability is one of the issues that got me to Gentoo in the end - 
the update/upgrade smoothness matches Debian, but it's possible to get into 
the metal and fix/roll my own if I want something offbeat - and then it's in 
the upgrade path too.

YMMV.

Cheers,
Bret
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