Re: [Hampshire] RAID and LVM boot disks

On 02/06/2009 18:47, Vic wrote:
> Dependencies are dependencies - they exist, whatever the distribution.
> The thing that never ceases to infuriate me is people who insist on
> blaming rpm for not solving dependencies for them - that's not it's job,
> just like it's not dpkg's job in a Debian-based distro.
>
> If you want to compare Debian's apt with something in a RH-based distro,
> the most apposite comparison would be apt. apt has a very similar
> interface to apt, being the same program, so apt users will quickly become
> accustomed to apt.
>
> You could also compare it to yum, which does a similar job in a slightly
> different way.
>
> But whinging about rpm is just silly - that would be like me complaining
> about dpkg hell on Debian, when yum is so much superior...
>


You are perfectly correct. The difference for me is package
availability and reliability, and long term server maintainability.
Debian gives me about 20,000+ packages out of the box, all maintained,
all guaranteed to work with each other, everything from figlet and dict
up to postgres and apache.

Almost everytime I've had to use a Redhat box, someone has had to drag
in packages from various sources across the Internet, or a local install
has been performed by compiling a tarball or dropping a precompiled
tarball somewhere more or less at random. Or,worse, someone has
crowbarred an RPM from one of the zillion not-quite-Redhat rpm-based
clones onto the box. (I'd feel equally sad about someone installing
Ubuntu packages on Debian, and vice versa).

In contrast, I don't recall the last time I had to compile something for
Debian, nor when some suitable tool wasn't more than an "apt-get install
foo" away. Keeping every single package up to date and patched is very
rarely more than two sudo commands of work.

Yes, I'm lazy. I consider this to be a good trait in a sysadmin.