On Mon, 5 Oct 2009 17:01:10 +0100
Hugo Mills <hugo@???> wrote:
> No reason at all. You're just hearing complaints from people who
> gave up on it many years ago, and never used the more recent tooling.
>
> For the record, I'm a Debian user through and through, but *I'm*
> fed up of hearing these outdated complaints about Red Hat packaging,
> too...
I hope it didn't sound like I was complaining about RH stuff, I cannot
comment on recent releases or installation tools I as haven't used
anything but Debian for many years.
However I would like to say that one of the reasons I use Debian is
that I haven't needed to reinstall* it since I put that first system
on a PC ten years or so ago. I have just moved seamlessly from one year
to the next with daily apt-get update (nowadays the update bit is taken
care by cron-apt) and apt-get upgrade (nowadays aptitude safe-upgrade)
And usually the only time I need to re-boot is following a major kernel
version upgrade (sometimes X.org fouls things up so that only a
re-boot will sort it out).
Debian is not completely free of dependency problems, it does happen
that packages don't remain in step with each other so aptitude finds
dependency problems between the various versions. It sometimes requires
some careful thinking about which of the solutions aptitude offers to
use. Making the wrong decision can have disastrous consequences.
For example there are problems with gnome-desktop in the testing
version of Debian I am using on my Acer Netbook and making the wrong
choice resulted in pretty well all of gnome being removed. Once I
realised what had happened (I wasn't watching the Acer screen but doing
other things after 'agreeing' to the suggested course of action) I
simply did an "aptitude install gnome" and got it all back.
I get the impression that with many 'popular' distros that people need
to reinstall when a distro does a major update. It was having to
re-install RH every time there was a version change as much as the rpm
problems that made me change to Debian.
* OK, I did need to reinstall when I moved from a 32 bit box
to a 64 bit box with sata disks so couldn't just move the old drives
from the previous system to the new and I did a re-install when I
realised I'd made the mistake by using LVM which I just didn't
understand.
As it happened doing that reinstall meant I could take advantage of the
new booting process Debian have moved to without any hassles :-)
--
John Lewis
using Debian Sid with windowmaker for a nicer desktop
