[wellylug] Microsoft At WellyLUG last night.

Pete Black pete at marchingcubes.com
Thu Jul 14 10:39:00 NZST 2005


But how is it Redhats fault if the other distros that use its packages 
as a base have deviated so far from it that their packages break a 
Redhat system?

Isn't it SuSE and Mandriva who, by forking Redhat's distribution and 
introducing deliberate incompatibilities that are to blame for Redhat 
users being 'locked-in'?

And when a Debian-based distro makes the same decision, and introduces 
significantly different components from the 'core' debian, resulting in 
a problems installing those packages on a vanilla Debian - will you 
accuse Debian of 'locking you in'?

I don't think it's accurate to characterise any of this as lock-in, 
especially when many Redhat-based distros use apt by default, and when 
Redhat gives you complete source code and total freedom to reconfigure 
the distro as you would like.

I can see why you don't want to continue this topic.

-Pete

> Just to explain.. and I don't really want to continue this topic...
>
> RedHat tie you in by providing you with a package format (.rpm) and an 
> update method (used to be 'up2date') as well as structure of 
> dependencies and corequisites that make it difficult to mix and match. 
> You can't install a useful .deb for example (or maybe you can with 
> some sort of 'alien' program). You may even have trouble installing a 
> Mandriva package on RedHat. 'up2date' is a nice tool to get all 
> updates and patches, but if you install an alien package, it can get 
> confused. If, as I do, you try to keep to software installed via a 
> package as much as is feasible, you are locked into that distro. Same 
> applies for SuSe and Mandriva. On the other hand, the various Debian 
> distros all work nicely together, packagewise and a Debian package 
> from any source will slot in OK. That's my experience and opinion.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Cliff
>
>




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