Ok, how bout SuSE 9.0?

[Fairlight]

At Sun, May 23, 2004 at 10:58:41AM -0700 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bill Campbell was observed uttering:
> On Sun, May 23, 2004, Felipe Perdomo wrote:
> ...
> >   For various reasons, I have decided to move from Red Hat to SuSE, and
> >   I just wanted to start evaluating the latest version to make sure that
> >   fP runs well.
> 
> I have always avoided RH, mostly because we're looking for boring, stable
> Linux for commercial environments so used Caldera until SCOG made this
> technically and morally impossible.  RH has always had a tendency to
> produce releases with library inconsistencies and other problems that
> looked to me as though they weren't testing them thoroughly.

What about legally, Bill?  *grin*

I was a RH proponent until two things happened.  One, they dropped RHL.
That didn't endear them to anyone.  It was their right though, and I was
still recommending their enterprise version to people needing to upgrade
past EOL RHL's for a while.  Then I had the dubious pleasure of trying to
hold a few 7.x systems together with hope, a prayer, and duct tape.  Having
been inside the depths of their SRPMS and seen the kind of BS rationale
they displayed for some methodologies, I can say I'm amazed that any RH
system ever worked.  7.3 seems fine on the outside.  Unless you have reason
to go into the actual SRPMS (like rebuilding all of something like PHP, for
instance, but wanting it to mesh with the rest of the system, plus be
checkable via --verify), you never really saw just how lousy it was.

Now I have severe doubts about their sanity over there.

I've only seen a few instances where RH fell into the MS trap of needing to
patch a patch.  And one of those was a partial initial to get the major
hole closed, with the ASN part that was less vulnerable but took longer
waiting about a week.

> I looked at all the commercial Linux distributions in late 2002 to see
> which most met our requirements, and decided on SuSE because it seemed the
> best engineered and most stable of the lot.  I haven't regretted that
> decision.

I'm liking SuSE 9.0 better than I've liked any distribution to date.  But I
won't go near 9.1 until they're past an equivalent of kernel 2.6.18.

I -really- wish the vendors would simply use the original source from the
original authors, and stop patching things internally, retaining version
numbers of their original base code, and calling what is really the
equivalent of say, apache 1.3.27 something like 1.3.24-37.  RH did that and
it ticked me off.  I hated it with Caldera too.  This is the only big thing
to me that is truly annoying with SuSE as well.  My theory is that they all
should do exactly what I did with PHP--dump the patches entirely, and just
replace the main distribution tarball and change the major version number
to reflect what it -really- is.

I'd love to see %patch yanked out of RPM specifically so they're forced to
do this, but that'll never happen and I know it.  This is the one thing
pandemic to all vendors that really, really annoys me.

And Bill Vermillion will now promptly bring up the FBSD ports system.
Yeah, yeah, I know already.  We don't -have- that in the penguin world.
Such is life.  That doesn't mean vendors -have- to be stupid about RPM
versioning or building.

mark->
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