[Sheflug] SuSE 7.0

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Andrews <craig [at] fishbot.free-online.co.uk> writes:

    Craig> Just been to www.suse.com and looked at the spec for SuSE
    Craig> 7.0.  Methinks they should have gone the Micro$haft route
    Craig> and called it SuSE 6.4se, or maybe OSR2.

    Craig> It seems all they have done is update the disks with
    Craig> perhaps the latest betas. plus the minor updates to 6.4,
    Craig> and called it 7. More like 6.41 or there abouts.

Well thank you for checking.  I stand by my logic (regarding different
targets for version number changes), but your facts certainly suggest
that it doesn't apply to this case.

    Craig> Debian looks nice, dontcha think?

Well, I like it; I use it.

But someone was saying that SuSE was getting bloated; so is Debian.
Too many packages depend on every .so under the sun.

It used to be that once you unpacked a .deb, everything was right
there where you'd expect it.  Package contents where FHS mandates, and
easily findable via dpkg -L.  Control files, invariably either sh,
bash, or perl scripts in /var/lib/dpkg/info.  Now, a lot of the
information is hidden in multiple private languages called "debconf",
"debhelper", etc.  They're all based on Perl, but they use Perl
packages scattered all over /usr/lib, and one Perl developer I know
says that the Debian utilities should be collected into a book
entitled "How Not to Write a Perl Script".

And releases are slow.

OTOH, if you have active, focussed maintainers for the packages you
care about, support is excellent.  But with few maintainers being paid
to do that work, active maintainers are a minority.

Debian is still the best distro for the "weekend hacker" IMO.  The
Debian policy manuals do explain how the distro and the packages are
put together, they're kept fairly up to date, and with a little effort
it's possible to figure out how things work.  And fix them.

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