Ok, how bout SuSE 9.0?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 03:46:44AM -0400, Fairlight thus spoke:
> On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 10:42:19PM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
> Bill Vermillion cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> > So you are dragging me into this discussion huh?

> Nah.  Not really.

Must have been someone else who mentioned my name :-)

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

> *ponder*  Hmmm.

> Well, at this point, I'm so used to RPM that it doesn't bother
> me to use it at all after all these years. It hasn't for years.
> At least for the core system. It's the versioning practices
> of the vendors that's evil, not the rpm software itself. As
> with any technology, one can use it wisely or really bloody
> half-arsedly. Guess which everyone seems to be doing. :(

I keep hearing/reading of problems with libraries mis-matching, and
having to DL something else, before you can install what you want.
I've had that on the few Linux boxen I've used.

> > 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.

> Yes, but OTOH, I -like- to install side-by-side versions of multiple
> kernels and alter the bootloader so that I always have a failsafe.

We're not talking kernels here.  And anyone who has used Unix for
any length of time always has at least ONE good kernel that is
placed where a system upgrade or relink [in SCO parlance] will
leave the good versions alone.  Anyone who hasn't learned that by
now needs to have his root access privledges removed :-)

> Well if you don't see anything by Wednesday, post it.  I'm curious.

Ah - what the heck.  It's called Gentoo.  It seems to be getting
more and more noise as it goes along, and a lot of that is because
of 'portage'.

> > 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.

> Nothing of the sort. I'm just saying I wholly despise the
> versioning that vendors are using for packages, and figured you
> would probably drag yourself into it by citing that the beastie
> world has no such issues,

Why should I insert BSD into a Linux discussion.  And when you
say 'versioning used by vendors' you are talking about the way
an OS vendor will diddle a version as opposed to an application
vendor, correct?

> Ports isn't needed to make things sane.  It's one alternative.

Ports have absolutely no relationship to the kernel or the base OS
in the beastie world.  About the only time you'll see a port
version of a base OS, is when a new sendmail is released.  That
will be in ports, and if you install it it goes into /usr/local/bin
just like all other non-OS programs.  Then you just modify the
mailer.conf file to point to the new binary location, just the same
way you'd used the mailer.conf to point to anyother MTA but not
break anything that calls sendmail.

> The other is called discipline, and I wish some vendors would
> learn the meaning of it.

Agree 100%+

> I wasn't trying to draw you out. You've just brought it up
> enough before that I anticipated a response that I guess wasn't
> going to come after all.

> I don't care -how- they do it.  Version things truthfully and I'll be 
> happy.  :)

We'll see ;=)

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com