For the most part, I agree with you.
I am interested to see what apt-get for RPM has in store for us in the future.
YaST2 is great (only in recent releases, it used to be the key reason I didn't
use SuSE), and it even tries to respect manual config changes, although I'm
still expecting handling of these to improve.
Nothing is perfect and it sounds like 8.2 still has a long way to go. The key
here is that SuSE is the BEST (Yes, I'll stand behind that) Linux out there
today.
To SuSE: Keep that Feedback page available and keep listening. As David
said, you are in a position technically and price-wise to sail past RedHat in
the marketplace. The better your stuff gets, the more people are willing to
pay the fair prices you charge. There are still software issues to be
resolved, but keep up the good work.
Food for thought. RPM's will continue to be a problem so long as dependencies
cause headaches. These headaches will require many things to solve them.
Key in this battle is Software Development teams adhering to LSB. Also key is
some sort of similarity of packaging: For instance, common levels of glibc,
etc... Some sort of agreement between RH and SuSE to provide at least the
same Kernel and glibc revisions.
I just downloaded my favorite Audio Editor (Audacity) from
packman.links2linux.de (MUST VISIT SITE). For most things that are non-SuSE
Standard, this site includes the dependencies. In this case, however, they
don't include wxGTK 2.4, and SuSE only provides wxGTK 2.3. RPMFIND and
wxwindows.org provide RPM's for 2.4-stable, GREAT! But they all require GLibC
2.3, and SuSE 8.1 provides 2.2.5... I'm not about to install a new version of
glibc. Yes, I'm sure I could, but it's about maintaining a common
installation among many boxes. For the Kernel and glibc (and as many core
systems as I can), I strive to keep systems using the provided RPM's from the
vendor. Why? Well, security updates, for one thing. A vulnerability is
found and I already have RPM's, I don't have to go find the new source and
compile it. Right now my laptop is pretty out of commision while I wait for
the "nice --19 rpm --rebuild wxGTK-2.4.0-1.src.rpm" to complete.
I DO hear great things abour Red Carpet, however, and I will try it out as
soon as I can.
Again, great job, SuSE. Keep it up!
On 08 May 2003 13:04:49 -0500
David Krider
- Fantastic updating mechanism with a great gui AND a great curses interface. (It's very easy to setup a local mirror of the updates, and even to automate local updates to look at the local mirror. Not only that, but the system actually _handles_ the dependencies, instead of just complaining.)
Whew!