Re: [TCLUG:9416] MediaOne Roadrunner and Linux (fwd)

[Scott Dier - dieman <dieman@ringworld.org>]

> The community, for the most part, has chosen RPM. Red Hat and derivatives,
> as well as other distros that use RPM (SuSE is very popular) constitute
> the majority of Linux installations.

Anyone have stats from the last installfest?  From what I remember there
was alot more slackware than I expected. (I mean, if your gonna claim
this, have something real-world to back it up.  Perhaps we have to wait a
few months until sales reports of the debian boxed set come back, or
perhaps cheapbytes has stats on what they sell, even tho thats just a
representation... hmmm. )

Hmmm. Well. According to linuxcounter, Redhat/Suse is 37%, Debian is 24%,
Slackware is 31%.  Two slashdot polls put SUSE/Redhat together as pretty
large.  There, I helped you with stupid poll numbers.

Then again, to get a demographic of people on slashdot:

56% Would rather download source. (making a dist more pointless to care
about)

Anyhow.  I'm never said that RedHat doesn't have a place in this world.
Most of its recent greatness has come around because it has catered to
people needing to do mass installs and business users who wanna try it
out.  Technical people use it too, but I dont find them looking for RPM's
as much as i see the debian community looking/building packages....  

Theres no good way to argue this.  Its all personal opinion and has been
as such.  I wouldn't consider RPM unless a group became a mass of
maintainers that work together to keep a central repository that is
organised and developed by known-developers. (ie: people are forced to
crossign keys as much as they can.  it helps their creditability when they
develop packages and increases the security of the central repository.)

I just dont have the feeling that redhat looks over contrib too much other
than cp files into there.  Debian has a contrib too and its mostly
non-mantainer-packages and can't allways be trusted to follow any sense of
policy.

Im not telling you to change.  Im telling you why I dont change.  Im
telling you that I dont like RPM...  And that this whole idea that the
rest of the world must go to RPM is really lame.  At least everyone is
going to that filesystem standard.  That should be good enough for most
things.

---
Scott Dier <dieman@ringworld.org> #nicnac@efnet 612.301.0265
      destiny's admin       | <YodaNsO> fear leads to anger, 
 http://www.ringworld.org   |           anger leads to hate,
finger me for gnupg/pgp key |           hate leads to solaris.