OFB Community Mailing Lists

[David Aikema]

Can't you people take some criticism?  Some of it may be invalid, or
incorrect, but do we need to immediately call it "Pure crap, trollish
nonsense."?  (If Linux has a PR problem, this may be a large part of
it.)

"I didn't read it all.....don't have the time and he's so far off the
mark I couldn't read it anyway" isn't exactly going to satisfy the
average person I think.

On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Eduardo Sánchez <lists at sombragris.org> wrote:

>> The irrational "megafreeze" distro model, which binds each and every
>> application to a fixed version for the whole supported period of a
>> given distro release.
>
> And so? In Windows you are tied to a specific version too. You are free
> to upgrade some apps... manually. In GNU/Linux is the same case. Want a
> newer OO.o? Upgrade it by hand, just as in Windows.
>
> Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense.

I've seldom met a Windows application with more than one or two
installation dependencies, whereas with Linux it doesn't seem that
uncommmon to have dozens of dependencies for a given application (once
the cascade effect is taken into account).  I think that this one is
legitimate.

(A lot of this comes from the problem of having no standard way of
doing a lot of things.  e.g. I have KDE4 installed on a machine, but
some of the apps that I use haven't been updated since KDE3, and since
KDE4 is basically a complete rewrite that means that I need to retain
a whole set of KDE3 libraries... and I haven't even gotten to GNOME
applications, or other applications yet).

>> The irrational "we must release every 6 months" mantra of the
>> majority of non-enterprise distros. This way, most bugs never get
>> fixed, while new bugs are constantly introduced.
>
> But some distros just release a new version "when it's ready". Prime
> example is Debian. If you want something really bug-free, use Debian
> stable. Slackware is very stable, too, and I use Slack 11 in production
> servers and in one desktop with no major problems.

Note his statement "majority of" and combine with his earlier
criticism of it being hard to upgrade applications.  Most of the
packages in Debian stable are aging.

> ...
>
> Verdict: True, but a straw-man argument. Let's focus in a something
> serious, not in a joke such as Red Hat.

For enterprise apps it seems that a lot of time support is limited to
specific distributions and even specific releases, and amongst such
applications RHEL may be the most commonly supported.  From the
enterprise side it's not seen as a joke.  If the company that some
application comes from won't be supported unless it's running on RHEL,
then you're probably going to be running it on RHEL.

Dave