Ok, how bout SuSE 9.0?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 09:39:14PM -0400, Fairlight thus spoke:
> 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:
> > ...

....


> > 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.

So you are dragging me into this discussion huh?

Just because your penguin systems doesn't have a ports system does
not mean that all penguin systems don't have it.

In FreeBSD it's called ports in the XXXX Linux [I'm going to let
you search for that one ;-)] it's called 'portage'.

The approach on that Linux system is similar to BSD but the install
[as I understand] basically builds the system on the fly, just as
building a BSD from sources is.

Thought it borrows ideas from FreeBSD in some ways it's a bit
different as it will support more than one version of a package,
while the ports supports only one.  That can be an advantage as I
have 'portaudit' installed in my nightly security tasks and it dl's
a comlete list of ports that have vulnerabilties, checks the
installed packages, and notifies me if any of the installed
packages have vulnerabilites.  I got the rsync notice the date they
found the buffer overflow in it.  And then a quick 'portupgrade
rsync' quickly fixed that.

Having multiple versions would make checking like that a bit more
difficult.  

According to the docs the portage system is a merge of python
and 'bash shell script based Ebuilds'  [not familiar with the term
Ebuilds.

If you need hints about the name of the distribution I'll post it
if no one else comes up with it.

Many of the BSD people have commented on the 'portage' system and I
suspect there will be some cross-breeding before it is all done.

But try not to drag me into the "My OS is better than you OS
discussions".  They don't do much but annoy the pig.


Bill
-- 

Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com