[lug] KRUD comments wanted

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 18:09, Peter Hutnick wrote:
> 2. flew through the nightmarish dependencies of MythTV using their
> packages (including apt).  Totally refocused the project off of dependency
> hell and back onto cool TV stuff.  Nice.

Yes, until they dropped the RH8 binaries.  FreshRPMs tends to go with
the latest/greatest only.  So its not something you want to deal with if
you have "legacy" (re: a year old or older) distributions.

I have a Set Top Box that had software distributed for certain hardware
components that required RH8.  I had to manually build MythTV in order
to get it working (which isn't really that hard, just time consuming)
because FreshRPMs dropped their RH8 MythTV packages.  Asking the vendor
to upgrade to RH9 didn't help - they told me "we're working on it", but
I can't wait around for them to get it done.

> I find this infinitely less frustrating than trying to shoehorn some
> Mandrake Cooker RPM in.

I don't see why so many people like Mandrake.  I installed Mandrake,
SusSE, Debian and Red Hat distributions not long ago in order to make
binary distributions for my Graphics Muse Tools CD.  Without a doubt Red
Hat and SuSE were the easiest to use.  Debian is a close third. 
Mandrake was a losing proposition all the way around.  Just too hard to
use for installation compared to the others.  And to be honest, I still
prefer Red Hat.  Once you get used to your flavor, the others never
taste as good.

> Maybe a simple way to say what I'm trying to say would be: a shift away
> from "more up to date (!) Red Hat than Red Hat" to "boutique RPMs, as easy
> as Red Hat's own RPMs."

I'd agree - support for older distributions is the way to go.  Keep up
with RH L/G, but don't drop the past 2 years of distributions because
you'll always have someone who needs it.  Hell, I've still got 7.2 boxes
on production servers.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>