"Peter C. Norton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Tue, Dec 29, 1998 at 10:50:37AM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
>
>> but what I've seen of Red Hat Linux doesn't overly impress
>> me.
>
>ObCuriousity: Relative to what? IMO redhat, debian, freebsd, etc are
>all pretty much neck-and-neck for installation, redhat and debian are
>way ahead for upgrading, and no commercial unix vendor comes close to
>any of these groups for maintenance. Where do you see them falling
>down?
Relative to high quality packages like <name your favorite djbware>
or, from what I've heard and read, OpenBSD.
I have no first-hand experience with Debian or FreeBSD, but I do play
with Red Hat LINUX at work and at home. The quality of the
*package*--not to be confused with the quality of the
components--leaves a lot to be desired. They seem to be more concerned
with incorporating the "latest and greatest" versions of everything
than with producing a well-integrated, sanely configured
package. E.g., many unnecessary network services are installed by
default, and with less than prudent configurations.
>> On the other hand, I find Dan's work very impressive. Not perfect,
>> by any means, but far more intelligent, coherent, and robust than
>> anything Red Hat has produced.
>
>He's also producing a small set of utilities that interact with each
>other (doing it very well, too - no disagreement there). Comparing
>the scope and complexity of Dan's projects to an OS vendors mission is
>apples and oranges.
Agreed. Writing an SMTP server from scratch and assembling
off-the-shelf freeware components into an operating system are very
different tasks. Developing qmail is a one-man, part-time,
not-for-profit programming job. Producing Red Hat LINUX is a
commercial team packaging effort. But I'm not comparing qmail and RHL
head-to-head, I'm considering the personal efforts of Dan Bernstein
and Donnie Barnes. From what I've seen, Dan produces the higher
quality product by far.
-Dave
