> On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Steven Black wrote:
>> [....] (Speaking of which, if you have PPC Macs, Debian may be one of
>> the last Linux distros which actively supports them. I found the Debian
>> support better than the "community" Ubuntu support last I tried it.)
>
> You can get Fedora 10 at
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-ppc ; and I haven't checked, but
> YellowDog is probably still around -- Fedora with an Apple interface.
My problem with Fedora is the same problem I have with all .RPM-based
distributions: The package management is bad enough to cause a
reasonable chunk of their development staff to jump boat and start
another Linux distribution (Foresight Linux). The RedHat management has
known it has been bad for years, and has ignored the engineers' requests
to get permission to improve it. (This being the reason the Foresight
people give for the development of the distro.)
The RedHat folks seem to think that package management isn't important
to people. (I only mention RedHat as they're the folks that invented the
RPM format. Their decisions with regard to RPM packaging are canon.)
Check this out (from http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html-single/Release_Notes/ ):
|Further, although Anaconda provides an option for upgrading from earlier
|major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
|5.3, Red Hat does not currently support this. More generally, Red Hat
|does not support in-place upgrades between any major versions of Red Hat
|Enterprise Linux. (A major version is denoted by a whole number version
|change. For example, Red Hat Enteprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise
|Linux 5 are both major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.)
The whole "Red Hat does not support in-place upgrades between any
major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux" thing is older that RHEL.
In-place upgrades for any RPM-based system is relatively new, and RedHat
still doesn't support it.
As I said, this isn't just a RedHat thing (from http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/What_is_New_for_Installation_and_Live_Images.html#sn-Upgrade_related_issues ):
|2.1.4.3. Upgrades versus fresh installations
|
|In general, fresh installations are recommended over upgrades. [...]
According to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DistributionUpgrades it looks
like Fedora started allowing for upgrades in Fedora 8:
|PreUpgrade is an application you can run on an existing Fedora 8 or
|above installation. You can continue to use Fedora while PreUpgrade
|downloads the packages required for the upgrade. Once everything is
|downloaded and set up, you will be notified that you can reboot at any
|time to start the Fedora upgrade. To read more, refer to PreUpgrade.
I know some people like to do the whole wipe/reinstall on a regular
basis, but it has just never been fun for me. I want to do cool stuff.
Reinstalls are work with the fun only coming in to play when you start
picking the new packages. Why not skip the labor and move straight to
the fun of picking the new packages faster with a distro that does real
system upgrades?
10+ years ago Debian had package management supporting clean, complete
system upgrades and migrations from experimental to stable releases, as
well as between one major stable release to another.
--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E
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