Ok, how bout SuSE 9.0?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 04:38:39PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth thus spoke:
> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 04:25:36PM -0400, Bill Vermillion wrote:

...

> > > Yeah, Bill; it's called apt-rpm.

> > > Or yum.

> > Mark hadn't mentioned those and I'd not heard of them. I've heard
> > of apt-get though which given that name can I assume it is part of
> > an apt* family as pkg* is?

> apt-rpm is basically a port of apt-get from .deb to .rpm; I gather
> it and yum both provide infrastructure as well.

OK.

> > > > That WAS a problem in FreeBSD.  And that was because so many of
> > > > the install scripts were Perl and Perl version dependant.  So
> > > > all the install scripts were re-written to use on shell of c
> > > > programs.  

> > > Well, *that's* overkill...

> > Not to their way of thinking, and it also meant that the OS was not
> > dependant on a 3rd party application.  A 'minimal' version - base
> > OS and many /usr things will fit in 200MB - and not having Perl
> > required to install that helps keep it down.  That means you can
> > build slim dedicated routeres and firewalls in a minimum of
> > space.

> How is perl any *more* "third party" than any of the *rest* of the
> stuff in a given install?  :-)

Perl for example can be compled under the Artistic License or
the GNU General Public License.

The core system strives to make sure that everything fits under
the Regents/Berkeley license.   In this case 'third party' is
non-Berkeley licensed code.  I guess you might call this part of
the heritage.

I don't know if any of this was work by The FreeBSD Foundation -
but they are the legal entity that can enter into agreements or
contracts with any that requires there be a legal group.  It's
a non profit 501.c.3 group.  


> > Part of the problem was default installs required the 5.005_03 and
> > since this were going to have to be re-written to work with the
> > newer version - they decided to make the move to keep everything
> > using sources over which they had complete control.

> > This way the end users could run any version of Perl they wanted.

> > Their reasons given sounded good.

> If you want to completely rewrite hundreds of installers, I guess.

It was done and that's the way 5.x is now.  Before not everything
was perl based, but they just rewrote what was in perl.  It gives
more consistancy to that part.

> People are expensive, and not many people are building embedded
> devices...

There still are quite a few.  The people who bought BSDI, Inc.,
[the ones sued by AT&T] have moved more into a Linux area this last
year, and a great deal of their product is in embedded devices.
You can check out what they do at windriver.com.

For most of us it makes no difference.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com