[mythtv-users] Some questions before I breakout the Mastercard

[Maarten]

On Wednesday 17 March 2004 19:44, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
> On Mar 17, 2004, at 03:44, Kevin D. Snodgrass wrote:


> >> RHEL3 WS? There's really no need. And nobody maintaining all the
> >> required packages for it, so you'd have to build lots of stuff
> >> yourself, which is somewhat counter-productive for an RPM-based
> >> distro, if you ask me. ;-)
> >
> > OK.  That idea is nuked.
>
> Which sort of adds a point against SuSE 9, despite Maarten's objections
> to my statement that its asking for trouble. Same situation as RHEL3,
> nobody maintaining all the packages. (Though hopefully, that'll change
> in the future, because yes, SuSE 9 really is quite nice).

This is only partially true in my opinion.  The reason google finds much less 
online SuSE rpm depositories stems also from the fact that SuSE is currently 
distributed on 2 DVDs, with a plethora of apps on it. At least in the period 
I used redhat, that was not the case for RedHat. It then came on 2 CDs, with 
an optional, non-free(!) powertools disk. Suse came on 7 CDs then.
Most of the stuff you needed to download for RH was already on the suse CDs.

I WILL admit that I'm _really_ biased against Redhat.  Let me explain...

I had the very unfortunate experience of being caught in the untimely 
migration of RH to the Glibc, back in the 4.2 / 5.0 days. I've never had so 
many crashes & problems with that single RH 5.0 as with all other 
distributions I have ever used, and RH first denied that there were problems 
and later bagatellized them. It took up to RH 5.2(!!!) before it all got 
really fixed.  And all this due to Redhat deciding that glibc was ready  for 
production when it wasn't, and a very lacking pre-release testing dept.
Come on, I had 2 unexplainable kernel panics a week, and nobody please dare 
telling me that Redhat would be unable to reproduce all those problems 
beforehand. I was not alone having problems, check back if you want...

So since then, I categorically *refuse* to touch anything redhat with a 
ten-foot-pole.  This RH 5.0 business cost me "5 years of my life" as they say 
and I still do not trust redhat to this very day.  Case(s) in point: other 
_real_questionable_ examples of RedHats' bad management decisions was 
installing an alpha version of GCC which broke just about everything 
(including building the linux kernel itself! How could that have been 
overlooked ?!?) The entire community has burned redhat for taking that stupid 
step then. And the stubbornness with which they push(ed?) Gnome and held back 
the much more useable and mature KDE also added to my dislike of them.

Sorry for getting so carried away here... ;-)   I'll stop right now.

Of course, none of this directly relates to anything MythTV, mind you.

Greetings,
Maarten