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

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 12:11, Maarten 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.

Which is both good and bad. Its hard to support (and QA) that much
stuff, but nice to have handy...

> 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.

Binaries on 3 CDs with RHL9 and FC1, 4 CDs as of FC2-test1. There are
some legal issues that slightly encumber Red Hat, since they're in the
US, while SuSE isn't (er, wasn't). Things may well change on that front
with the Novell purchase.

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

Ah! Okay. ;-)

> 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...

Oh, I know things haven't always been rosy. Lots of people weren't very
happy until 6.2, which is when I *really* got into Linux hard-core, so I
probably missed out on some of your trials and tribulations (at that
point, I was in college playing baseball most of the time, only dabbling
in Linux with what little spare time I had).

> 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.

Can't argue with you there. They still push Gnome over KDE. I'm using
KDE 3.2.1 as I type this on my FC1 workstation though (thanks to the
3rd-party apt repo, kde-redhat.org). Just like the distro vs. distro
thing though, both have their advantages and drawbacks...

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

No problem, I like to hear other people's thoughts, especially when they
have very valid points.

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

True. But hey. ;-)

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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