<quote who="Stuart Krivis"> > I've never felt RPM was as good as DEB. RPM-based distros just > don't seem to be as maintainable over the long haul. > > Personally, I have issues with a binary-based distribution. I am > enamored of the *BSD ports system and buildworld. :-)
while ports serve a certain purpose, i much prefer debs and apt-get over ports any day. main reasons is on most systems i don't want/need dozens of devel packages installed. i also like the idea that debian(and redhat too) keeps the sources on their own distro sites, whereas the vast majority of ports that ive seen rely on the original distribution site. i am starting to like freebsd(have been using it off and on for a couple years, deployed my first set of production servers last month running freebsd). another big complaint against freebsd(and openbsd, haven't tried BSD/OS or netbsd). is the apparent lack of effort put into the packages. config files are left generic, most packages do not provide init scripts of any kind, little documentation on how to get things to start(luckily i had a basic idea on how to use the daemons i installed as ive used them on other platforms). infact default installs appear to leave most service packages completely non functional until you rename a bunch of config files(most come with extention of .sample). i also don't like that packages install all to /usr/local. i can see how ports would do this but i would expect software installed via sysinstall to go to /usr i avoid ports whenever i can. i use sysinstall to install binary packages, but that can be a pain because the search function does not work on any of the installs i've done. and it has to re download the INDEX file everytime i use it, even if its only been 30 seconds since i last used it. that said, i love freebsd's ability to work in bridged mode, DUMMYNET for traffic shaping sofar works great, i like ipfw and ipf MUCH MUCH more then ipchains(wish someone would port one or both to linux 2.2). the basic install has full support for large files(i was shocked to see i could make 8GB files). though the kernel is big! which is odd to me. my kernel(with a decent amount of stuff compiled in) is 2.2MB. compared to about 700KB for a full blown linux 2.2 kernel. it doesn't bother me i just think about some times ive seen people complain about the size of the linux kernel .. i attempted to deploy OpenBSD firewalls but the eepro driver was not stable on openbsd for the dual port chipset my systems had. openbsd would panic after a few minutes under nil load doing NAT. openbsd mailing list never responded to my questions. i later deployed an openBSD nameserver and it ran for about 6 months till i attempted to upgrade it to 2.9 (from 2.8) and the upgrade tried to compile a bunch of crap i didn't want and didn't have installed like kerberos. that and the compile bombed everytime(memory error or something). being 900 miles away i could not install off hte CD. so i had someone local wipe it out and put debian on it. least i don't have to reboot it to upgrade(OBSD 2.8-2.9 reccomended/required recompiling the kernel and rebooting before upgrading the system itself) my freebsd server deployments are soley in the network monitoring area. each system is starting out with a single quad port ethernet card(Znyx) to sniff traffic. i will eventually upgrade them to have 2 or 3 quad port cards to sniff at other locations on the networks. the cards operate in bridged mode doing sniffing/optional firewalling and optional traffic shaping. working flawlessly sofar. now i am waiting for freebsd 4.5 to come out to see if there are any related horrors to upgrading it like there was with openbsd. hoping there is not. nate