Ok, how bout SuSE 9.0?

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, May 23, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>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*

Legality has little or nothing to do with the U.S. ``legal'' system.

...
>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.

One of the things that I really like about RPM is the philosophy of
building from pristine sources, applying patches, and controlling it all in
the SPEC file.  Used properly, this makes maintaining packages much easier,
and can work around some truly bizarre default locations used by the
authors of the original sources (e.g. putting non-vendor stuff in /usr/bin
instead of under /usr/local where $DEITY intended :-).

>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.

I've been using the OpenPKG.org packaging system for about 18 months now,
and it solves many of the problems of dealing with a heterogenous mix of
*nix systems.  OpenPKG is an RPM based system that is independent of any
vendor's packaging system, and is designed so the SRPMS are portable across
a number of *nix systems including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and some others
that I'm not using (I also have it working on SCO OpenServer).

OpenPKG handles dependencies very nicely, and has tools that allow one to
build all necessary packages quite easily.  Things like apache and all its
modules are handled much more easily than anything I've ever used.  As an
example, the apache SRPM contains everything necessary to build it with any
of the supporting modules you're likely to use, and the modules can be
specified in a central build control file.  Here's the ``rpm -qi apache''
output from the FreeBSD system I'm using for e-mail (which is somewhat out
of date as it's an internal server).

Name:     apache                    Source RPM:   apache-1.3.29-20040421.src.rpm
Version:  1.3.29                    Signature:    md5:eb88b77651bb26bd9f4e86f0e8e950ad
Release:  20040421                  Build Host:   alexis.mi.celestial.com
Group:    Web                       Build System: ix86-freebsd4.8
Class:    BASE                      Build Time:   Fri Apr 30 12:22:23 2004
Distrib:  OpenPKG                   Install Time: Fri Apr 30 12:23:02 2004
License:  ASF                       Install Size: 13288364 bytes
Packager: The OpenPKG Project       Relocations:  /home/csoft/freebsd48 
Vendor:   Apache Software Foundation
Summary:  Apache HTTP Server
URL:      http://httpd.apache.org/
Description:
    The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort
    aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and
    freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server.
    The project is jointly managed by a group of volunteers located
    around the world, using the Internet and the Web to communicate,
    plan, and develop the server and its related documentation. These
    volunteers are known as the Apache Group. In addition, hundreds
    of users have contributed ideas, code, and documentation to the
    project.
Provides:
    apache::with_suexec = yes
    apache::with_suexec_caller = csoft
    apache::with_suexec_userdir = public_html
    apache::with_suphp = no
    apache::with_suphp_caller = csoft
    apache::with_suphp_phpcgi = /home/csoft/freebsd48/cgi/php
    apache::with_mod_ssl = yes
    apache::with_mod_perl = yes
    apache::with_mod_php = yes
    apache::with_mod_dav = no
    apache::with_mod_layout = no
    apache::with_mod_macro = no
    apache::with_mod_auth_ldap = yes
    apache::with_mod_auth_mysql = yes
    apache::with_mod_auth_pam = no
    apache::with_mod_gzip = yes
    apache::with_mod_fastcgi = no
    apache::with_mod_throttle = no
    apache::with_mod_access_referer = no
    apache::with_mod_owa = no
    apache::with_mod_roaming = no
    apache::with_mod_relocate = no
    apache::with_mod_security = no
    apache::with_mod_dosevasive = no
    apache::with_mod_php_calendar = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_mysql = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_pgsql = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_gd = no
    apache::with_mod_php_bdb = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_debug = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_pdflib = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_zlib = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_bzip2 = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_ssl = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_openldap = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_openldapsasl = no
    apache::with_mod_php_mm = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_pcre = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_ftp = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_java = no
    apache::with_mod_php_oci7 = no
    apache::with_mod_php_oci8 = no
    apache::with_mod_php_freetype = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_gettext = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_imap = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_xml = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_dom = no
    apache::with_mod_php_bc = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_transsid = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_curl = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_mhash = yes
    apache::with_mod_php_mcrypt = no
    apache::with_mod_php_wddx = no
    apache::with_mod_php_gdbm = no
    apache::with_mod_php_versioning = no
    apache::with_mod_php_snmp = no
    apache::with_mod_php_odbc = no
    apache::with_mod_php_mbregex = no
    apache::with_mod_php_mbstring = no
    apache::with_mod_php_exif = no
    apache::with_mod_php_iconv = no
    apache::with_mod_php_sendmail = no
    apache::with_gdbm_ndbm = no
    apache::with_shared_core = no
    apache::with_shared_chain = no
    apache::with_debug = no
    apache = 1.3.29-20040421

	http://support.celestial.com/doc/openpkg/

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

``If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the
government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those
guarantees.''
   -President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993