Jeremy Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: JH> Dpkg vs RPM JH> Both managability and build packages. I have heard a lot JH> of "good things" about dpkg.
My experience has been that it can be extremely hard to upgrade a system from one RH release to another, and that RH is very bad about providing migration paths between releases. In contrast, it's easy to upgrade Debian machines (I track the "unstable" branch and do an upgrade every day or two), and Debian's APT tool can handle even the messiest system upgrades with only one or two user commands. Oh yeah, and I've never used a --force-* option with dpkg (unless some package in unstable was broken, but that usually cleans itself up every day or two). JH> Customization of the distro JH> We do a lot of customization to our distro. Can this easily JH> be done with debian? Debian seems to be fairly tweak-friendly; dpkg makes an effort to not overwrite users' configuration files without advance notice. Building Debian packages takes a little work, but there are semiautomated tools that help a lot. JH> Autoinstall (Red Hat's kickstart) JH> This is also something fairly important. We need this as we do a JH> lot of mass installs. This isn't quite there. IANADD, but my guess is that this functionality will probably appear (via APT and debconf) in a few months. The groundwork for this is still being written. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell
