Re: support for RedHat distributions

[Chris Demwell <cdemwell@sfu.ca>]

Torsten wrote:
> Further - I find Debian's "apt-get" based package managing system way
> easier to use than any RPM's ...

Disclaimer: I have no experience managing more than ten Linux machines at 
once.

Agreed, plus it allows RPM integration through the Debian "alien" tool. I
should amend Greg's comment that updates are slow by saying that security
patches are quick. Plus, the administrator can tune the newness/stability
balance point by choosing a package pool:

* Stable - Will Not Break, quite old.
* Testing - Probably (I'd guess 95%) won't break, rather new.
* Unstable - Newest software in the system, and hence sometimes (yearly?) 
breaks.

The Stable pool has a separate "security" pool which incorporates
emergency patches. Nearly all packages have source packages as well should
one need to compile from scratch.

There are also many tools to cache packages, so that mass upgrades would
only pull packages from off-campus once. Further, Debian package
maintainers go to great lengths to homogenize the interface to
configuration of packages.  Further, Debian runs on so many platforms I'd
be shocked that it didn't run on a pair of dirty socks.

Judging by the functionality of stock Red Hat desktop machines on the
CSSnet, stock Debian machines seem much less buggy and are probably far
easier to maintain.

If someone from ACS wanted to test-drive a Debian system, I am certain
that I could provide access to some machine. My lack of experience
prevents me from truly objective analysis. I also refer you to #debian on
irc.freenode.net and perhaps #debian-devel on the same network. Warning:
they're public channels mainly, and I'm sure that I don't need to warn
about IRC.

        Chris