Re: [BLUG] .ppc (was Laconica, Enlightenment, and LFS)

(Reply at bottom)

Steven Black wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 10:02:09AM -0500, Beartooth wrote:
>
>> 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.
>

The Apt tools have been ported to work in an RPM environment. Yum is a
step in the right direction, but why have McDonald's when you can have
steak?

Then again, the thing that really sets Debian's packaging apart isn't
the tools. It's the commitment to quality. There are strict rules on
when packages can be migrated from experimental to unstable, to testing,
and eventually to stable. When Debian releases, you can count on Stable
to be /STABLE/. I never used a special tool to upgrade between Debian
releases. I left my sources.list pointing to testing (an alias for the
current testing release) and did apt-get dist-upgrade. Any problems I
had were minor and easy to fix.

Well, that and they have much, much more software packageed in the
official repos than the RPM-based distros do. You rarely need a
third-party repository, and when you do it's usually just
debian-multimedia.org.

-Barry
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