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Customized and derived distributions
Customized and derived distributions
Posted Dec 6, 2007 23:19 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111)Parent article: Customized and derived distributions
Ummm, Debian didn't re-invent the wheel. It *invented* the wheel, at least in the Linux world; AIX filesets and installp may predate debs and dpkg, although I have no idea if Ian Murdochk knew about them.
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Inventing the wheel ... or the axle, differential, bearing, ....
Posted Dec 10, 2007 1:30 UTC (Mon) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]
In the context of this article's analogy "the wheel" represents the Linux
distribution. MCC-Interim, SLS (SoftLanding Systems), Jurix, TAMU and
their ilk were different incarnations of a new concept --- different
operating systems, independently created from a common collection of
free software sources.
Working within this analogy Debian was another incarnation (a re-invention
of this concept). What they invented (their package management) is
perhaps analogous to an axle and/or differential. Their package manager
by itself is not substantively different than Red Hat's RPM (they both
"package" a set of precompiled binaries, libraries, man pages, and
other resources along with {pre,post},{install,remove} scripts, and
metadata (including dependencies). If we think of those as the
"axle" then perhaps one could extend the analogy to the breaking point
by likening the dependency structure -- parts of the Debian policy ---
or perhaps the ''dselect'' utility would be the differential.
JimD
Inventing the wheel ... or the axle, differential, bearing, ....
Posted Dec 10, 2007 4:35 UTC (Mon) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]
Their package manager by itself is not substantively different than Red Hat's RPM
Uh, dpkg and .deb predate RPM by a good bit, and were unique (in Linux distributions) at the time, with the ability to list and uninstall packages, and to express dependencies on other packages. (At least, as far as I can remember; it was certainly those features that made me choose Debian over SLS, around Debian 0.91)