[CLUE-Tech] Fedora vs Debian

[Collins]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 16:08:36 -0700 (PDT)
Brandon N <bneill at yahoo.com> wrote:

[ perfectly valid arguments snipped ]  

> 
> I, and I think most on here, aren't of the mindset that one
> distribution is good, and the others are evil, because each
> distribution serves a portion of the population.  As long as they all
> collabarate on the big issues, like LSB, I think it's good to have
> several options.  
> 

I have to agree with much of what you say. I'm negative about Debian, but that doesn't make it a bad distro.

I, for one, haven't seen much in the way of "collaboration" where the LSB is concerned. My general impression (which may be wrong, but not by much) is that they took the approach: whatever RedHat has done must be good. On top of that, they have turned it into an incredibly rigid standard. LSB has set themselves up as traffic cops rather than fostering actual collaboration (except for the commercial distros who have the bucks to play these games).

One of the frequent contributers on another Linux group gets really bent out of shape about Gentoo because Gentoo is not 100% LSB compliant. The major bone of contention is how to handle multiple versions of large packages like kde and gnome. The LSB only allows any leniency in /opt.  Gentoo follows the standard placement of most libraries, but chooses to install kde, for example, in subdirectories of /usr/kde which makes it easy to install and run multiple versions. On Gentoo, all software installed from source goes under /usr. /opt is reserved for binary packages. /usr/local is for local administrator stuff.

I don't really see the big deal about LSB, since most (all that I know of, anyway) LSB compliant systems suffer from the age old problem of binary distributions: My LSB compliant RPM (or deb package) may not work on your LSB compliant system unless the gcc, glibc, etc., etc. versions are very much in sync.

Which is way off topic, since Fedora, Debian, and SUSE even are LSB compliant.

-- 
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( CR ) Collins Richey
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