[lug] KRUD comments wanted

[Elyse M. Grasso]

On Tuesday 12 August 2003 06:36 pm, efm at tummy.com wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We've been doing KRUD since Red Hat version 5, over 5 years now.
> 
> At that time many people were confined to slow dial-up lines if they had
> any Internet connectivity at all.  Red Hat was releasing new versions
> about twice a year, and didn't include some important tools such as SSH.
> 
> Debian was the only distribution doing download updates, and their package
> retrieval tool was pretty rough.
> 
> So, Kevin Fenzi started doing his Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution (KRUD)
> to solve the needs of:
> 
>    Getting a full, up-to-date distribution in the hands of people on a
>    regular basis, who didn't have an easy, convenient, safe, effective
>    way of getting an up-to-date distribution.
> 
>    We've also found tools that we really liked and included them in the
>    base CD(s), such as lftp, openssh, and tools that we've written such
>    as rebootonpanic and isinglass.
> 
> Many of the core reasons for doing KRUD, such as slow or non-existent
> Internet connections have gone away over the last several years.
> 
> Some of the core reasons, such as an improved package selection are still
> very relevant.
> 
> I'd like to hear from everyone who is interested in the future direction of
> KRUD on the krud-users mailing list:
> 
>    http://lists.tummy.com/mailman/listinfo/krudusers
> 
> I'm interested in hearing what you want out of a distribution, what you
> like about KRUD, what you don't like about KRUD, and anything else you'd
> like to comment on.
> 
> To reassure everyone, we have no specific plans to stop doing KRUD or
> KRUDserver anytime soon.
> 
> But, we'd like to be sure that the effort we put into doing KRUD is
> solving a real problem for people.
> 
> And if it isn't, we'd like to know what the real problems are, so we can
> put more effort into solving those, so that KRUD, and all the rest of the
> work we do remains a valuable solution for real problems.
> 
> I look forward to hearing from all of you on the krudusers mailing list.
> -- 
> Regards,                    tummy.com, ltd 
> Evelyn Mitchell             Linux Consulting since 1995
> efm at tummy.com               Senior System and Network Administrators
>                             http://www.tummy.com/
> _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
As a krud user for several years who has no hope of broadband access at home 
any time soon, I consider the CD updates vital. (On a good day I get 20k 
connections at home).

They are also useful archivally: we have machines in our lab at work that need 
to be at very specific RedHat release levels, and my collection of old KRUD 
disks makes it easy to create or recreate the versions we need. (We work with 
a proprietary tool which is annoyingly fussy about which RedHat kernel builds 
it will play with).

On the other hand, I'm not fond of the way RedHat butchers KDE (wasn't there a 
recent survey that found that KDE is more popular/widely used than GNOME 
among Linux users?). And I am getting seriously annoyed at the way RedHat 
keeps dropping admin tools that worked in favor of their own customized admin 
interfaces that mostly don't, to the extent that I keep wondering whether I 
would be better off switching to Mandrake. (Not likely to happen while 
ClearCase/ClearQuest are so fussy about RedHat kernels).
-- 
Elyse M. Grasso