- Testing and Quality Assurance. - Verification that all the packages work together. I guarantee that the developer as packager does not test their package on as many different configs as SuSE does. - Additional patches/updates/security backports/performance enhancements to the core packages (last I heard Novell/SuSE put over 1000 patches to the kernels they distribute in the Enterprise Linux versions). - Sane defaults - Conformance to the Linux Standards Base (LSB) - etc, etc, etc So, no - not every single RPM is provided by the developers. Lots are, sure, but arguably the ones that matter or need changing to fit into the (hopefully well thought out) SuSE system are done by SuSE engineers. But then again I could always be mistaken, as this is just my perception of how things work. - Michael me@prestoncrawford.com wrote:

I asked SuSE support about the lack of Gnome Conduits and this is what I got...

"Unfortunatly it is up to the developer of the software to package it up for each distribution they wish to support, unfortunatly, if the package is not available for SuSE linux all I could suggest would be searching for the sources and compiling it on your system, beyond that theres not much we could do."

So... (SuSE team listening) does this mean that every single RPM installed in SuSE is provided by the people who developed the software? The Kernel, Gnome, KDE, all of that comes to SuSE already ready to go. SuSE doesn't do anything, really. What, then, does SuSE do? Burn them all onto a CD for me? Seriously, this is the most ridiculous response I've ever received from a SuSE rep. I don't, for a minute, believe that the developers of Gnome-pilot-conduits created RPMs, packages, etc. for Mandrake, Fedora, Ark Linux, FreeBSD, Debian, etc. but not for SuSE. That's absurd.

All I wanted was a straight answer and I got the biggest line of bull ever.

Preston