[SGVLUG] FC repository searches

[Jeff Carlson]

Dustin Laurence wrote:
> I'd never start with Knoppix, for fear of precisely that.  Also, if you
> want to play sufficiently advanced tricks with apt the configuration is more
> confusing than a Medieval proof of the existence of God, but you
> shouldn't be doing that anyway. :-)  It doesn't count if you didn't
> start from Debian itself.

If that's true, and I'm not positive it is, then Knoppix should not
advertise its installer as installing Debian.  How is someone like me to
know the difference?

>> Essentially, there is no advantage of RPM over DEB or DEB over RPM.
>> Both do the same job, and both contain just about the same meta-info.
> 
> I'm not at all convinced that this is true, and the major piece of
> evidence is the fact that (based on discussions with users) it's normal
> to upgrade a Debian machine from release to release without
> re-installing (our own David Lawyer is an extreme example of this),
> while this appears to be the exception with RPM-distro users.  When
> people ordinarily just upgrade through several releases without burning
> CDs and reinstalling, I'll be more convinced (take that as a friendly
> challenge for the Fedora project, if you like).

I really don't think that's an RPM vs DEB issue.  It can be done with yum.

Step 1.  Manually upgrade the fedora-release package.
Step 2.  Clear out your cache directories.
Step 3.  yum update

You should consider doing some things like copy the new RPMs to the yum
cache ahead of time if you have them or else you will be downloading
them all right before you begin.

> We'd all be better off if, in the end, we all used the same manager, and
> it would be worth the pain of transition.

I had heard some rumor of being able to use Debian packages in Fedora, I
think using smart, but again, this scares me.

> "One package manager to rule them all" isn't going to happen, we can
> agree, but it's a disgrace, not a feature or even an irrelevancy.  We
> need it, and it's worth the pain.

I'm can't necessarily agree there.  I'm glad Debian and RedHat have
different package managers.  Competition breeds innovation, you know.

> "Openly" is the key here.  I think the ambiguous product placement (it's
> stable, er, no it isn't, er yes it is) is a place where the tie to Red
> Hat is a genuine disadvantage.  Red Hat doesn't really want to admit the
> degree to which Fedora is suitable for typical server jobs because it
> then begins to compete with their commercial product, but Fedora's users
> and foundation really want it to be server-ready.  This tension isn't
> resolvable as Fedora is currently constituted, I don't think.

Yeah, I agree with you there.  Fortunately for companies who want to use
Fedora as the cheaper alternative, they can pay people like me to
maintain it for them.

> Zow.  You're kidding.  If there's one thing Debian does, it's document
> such things at excessive length.  In fact, I think they more or less
> pioneered this.  Most community distro's written goals and such seem to
> be direct imitations of Debian's efforts in this regard.

I'm familiar with the Debian social contract and all, but I haven't dug
into their website looking for goals like Fedora has published.  Sorry,
the limitation here is on my previously expended effort.

I wonder if this thread will ever die a normal death.