Less zelotism, please [LWN.net]

Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 21, 2004 19:36 UTC (Thu) by X-Nc (guest, #1661)
Parent article: Ubuntu Linux and the future of Debian

> Debian has a lot of appeal. It is an excruciatingly free
> distribution characterized by a widely recognized technical
> excellence. It offers a variety of packages which is second
> to none and a package management system which is unequaled
> elsewhere.

This is a little bit annoying. Yes, Debian is a top notch distro with great "technical excellence". So are Red Hat and SUSE. Debian isn't any more excellent than they are. But that's just a little niggle. The real annoyance is the last sentence. The package management system for Debian is in no way any better than the package management system for, say, Fedora. The differences between the DEB and RPM formats are negligible and both can use apt & yum to manage their packages.

Debian is a very good distro, as I have already said. But it isn't better than most of the big name distros. I think it would be good if the unsubstantiated zealotry for Debian here could be toned down just a bit. It's detrimental to the credibility of LWN. Leave the arrogant pontifications to the Grumpy Editor's section.

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Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 21, 2004 22:10 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

Actually, there are people (myself included) that will argue dpkg/.deb is better engineered than RPM, even without getting into support infrastructure Debian has and RPM-based distros have borrowed in the past (alternatives the menuing system for example). No attempts at an inherently broken "file dependencies" system, proper virtual package support, recommends and suggests, and per-package or local file diversions. When making packages, debhelper and CDBS make producing high-quality packages that integrate into Debian a breeze, compared to spec file making. When the surrounding tools like aptitude, debconf, and deborphan/debfoster are thrown it, it's very easy to call Debian's package system unequaled.

It's great that APT can support RPM now, and I agree that closed the gap significantly. But RPM still has a long way to go, and it doesn't help that there are competing incompatible versions of it.

Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 22, 2004 1:26 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

How about acknowledging some of the drawbacks of apt/dpkg? For instance, the dpkg database is sloooow. Debconf has become an annoyance, stopping most installs to ask inane questions (even with priority set to the highest. Many packages force you to learn obscure infrastructure (alsa modutils, a2enmod, etc). It's hard to know what force flags to use. It's embarrasingly difficult to install an equiv for any nontrivial package. Etc...

Personally, I'd say the original poster had it right: RPM and apt/dpkg each have their benefits and drawbacks. Personally, I've used Debian for the past 4 years because it's been the best tool for the job. This week, though, I did replace 2 of my 3 Sid machines with Ubuntu...

Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 22, 2004 3:09 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

Debconf has become an annoyance, stopping most installs to ask inane questions (even with priority set to the highest.

This isn't a fundamental flaw in Debconf itself -- just its misuse. One thing Ubuntu has done has been to ensure a lot of these questions are not shown; either ignoring notes that are unimportant to the user, or taking sensible default to questions that have them.

Many packages force you to learn obscure infrastructure (alsa modutils, a2enmod, etc).

I would argue that a2enmod is no more obscure than editing the apache config file, and it's well-documented (bias alert: I wrote it).

It's hard to know what force flags to use.

dpkg --force-help tells you, but you shouldn't ever need to use it.

A bit OT re: a2enmod

Posted Oct 22, 2004 4:43 UTC (Fri) by tsinclai (subscriber, #11399) [Link]

You wrote a2enmod?

I teach a class in Linux system administration and switched recently from Red Hat to Debian (via
Knoppix) and I must say that the way the apache2 package is organized is much easier to
manage and your scripts (did you do a2demod as well?), while obvious in hindsight, make my job
a lot easier.

I modified the scripts to create the equivalent functionality for enabling and disabling sites.

Anyway, much thanks for your good work!

Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 22, 2004 8:05 UTC (Fri) by walles (subscriber, #954) [Link]

The package management system for Debian is in no way any better than the package management system for, say, Fedora. The differences between the DEB and RPM formats are negligible and both can use apt & yum to manage their packages.

Something that you don't acknowledge is the vast amount of packages available for Debian, and that there's one central repository that effectively works as a normalizer for the Debian derivatives.

This makes it a lot more likely on Debian (and its derivatives) than on Redhat (and its derivatives) that:

A package you're looking for is available in the default repository.
If not, a package that will work fine on your system is available in another repository that can simply be added to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
If not, a standalone package that will work fine on your system is available for download from somewhere else.

So it's not just about the file format and the infrastructure, it's what's being done with it.

Less zelotism, please

Posted Oct 22, 2004 17:27 UTC (Fri) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

> Something that you don't acknowledge is the vast amount
> of packages available for Debian

Oh, most definitely. You will note that I didn't include this aspect when I made my original post. The Fedora community is working with various repositories rather than a central one. This can be both good and bad but I do like the Debian way better.