Debian (was Re: [Sheflug] Re: Problem )

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

I jotted:
> 
> Chris...who thinks Debian maybe going to the land of /dev/null and
> 	replaced by Slack on his box...
> 

Richard responded:
> Ah....  !!   Signs of cowardice in the community eh ? :))
> 
> TBH, Slackware is the distro that is used by the BBC R&D team so not 
> many people can see too much that's wrong with it.
> 

[[ Warning! Possible irrational griping below!! ]]

<GRIPE TYPE="grumble">
Well Debian's package management requires jumping through more hoops than 
RPM's, to a point. Those that haven't used it - a quick explanation.

Debian packages come as .deb's as are installed (if downloaded individually) 
using a command, dpkg. Debian system packages though can be installed with 
apt-get, and what this does is say I type "apt-get install mailx", apt-get 
will connect to one of its archive sites, download it and install it 
automagically.

The problem is apt-get has an overly-loyal and totally unbending love of 
dependcancies. Which is a problem for someone like me who does a lot of source 
compilation and rarely uses package management.

This came to a front when I noticed that for some reason I'd not installed 
mailx ... so off I go, 'apt-get install mailx'. And apt-get tells me it 
requires an MTA. I've already got qmail installed[1], but there is no way to 
tell apt-get to ignore dependancies. Instead, you do the apt-get, but use 
download instead of install, cd to the pakcage cache directory, and dpkg the 
file manually, as dpkg *can* be told to ignore dependancies.

apt-get is all very nice, but I want a system I can use rather than one that I 
need to jump through hoops for. If I wasn't a source monster, apt-get/dpkg 
seems like mana from heaven compared to RPMs.

Another gripe I have with Debian is its default single user runlevel...and 
it's complete concept of the rc sequence. Unlike Suse and Redhat (and Slack, 
but Slack is totally different again), which have seperate rcX.d directories 
for each runlevel, Debian uses both rcX.d and rcS.d (ie the single-user level 
directory) to bring a machine up. This I discovered when trying to find out 
why dhclient was being started on boot, and then later when bringing the 
network up (dhclient at start caused dhclient to listen on all interfaces 
regardless - the later dhclient invocation actually started it on eth1 
according to /etc/network/interfaces which is what I wanted).

To cut a long story short, dhclient was being executed from /etc/rcS.d...which 
means that also dhclient starts up in single user mode...as also does portmap 
(?!)...single user also mounts all your filesystems including NFS (which is 
why it starts portmapper) and does all sorts of other things.

Coming from a trad. unix background, I find this rather nasty - single user 
*should* start only *minimal* services - ie, a getty and whatever system 
services are needed for a user to actually make use of the system, and also 
only the root FS should be mounted.

I know its griping and I know I could fix it, but TBH I really don't want to 
spend time cutting out graft that shouldn't be there (and further, I see no 
good reason for it to be there either).

Slackware does what its told and doesn't give nasty suprises like this, which 
is why it's going back on this machine, probably this weekend.
</GRIPE>


> Try telling that to an Open BSD developer ? :)
> 

*shrug* OpenBSD is going to go on my firewall box, buttercup, when I can 
borrow a CD-drive from someone (to use the one in my workstation, bubbles, 
means unplugging the SCSI card as well as the CD drive. Not summat I want to 
do just yet. From what little of OpenBSD I've used though, I do like it 
(similarly FreeBSD as well).

Chris...


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.