[lug] Debian is better?

[Daniel Webb]

On 18 Dec 2002, Tom Tromey wrote:

> Daniel> They have really supported a lot of good stuff, like autotools
> Daniel> development (thanks, Tom!)
>
> Actually, Red Hat has never supported autotools development, to my
> knowledge.  Well, not consciously :-).

  Hehe.  Oops.  I thought they were involved with autotools, probably
because the autotools book is on their web site.

> I don't work on the distribution per se.  Partly as a consequence of
> that, I'm not really offended by criticisms of it :-).  Still, I think
> the Red Hat distribution is pretty good.  Like Debian, it is something
> that its developers can be proud of.  But then, I'm one of those
> people who think that the direction RH is going with the desktop is
> pretty cool.  I saw 8.0 demos recently and liked it a lot -- I'm
> looking forward to upgrading.

  RedHat is definitely moving faster on the desktop, which will make it
more attractive than Debian for most people.  I would prefer that Debian
stick to making a stuper-stable distro.  It seems to be slipping in that
regard lately, which is a shame.  I found three bugs in the apt tools
last week, all of which had already been reported in the bug database.
Not just little bugs, show-stoppers and segfaults.  Sigh.

Someone is working on an applet to indicate security updates for Debian,
but I don't know how far along it is.  I just read the security emails and
decide based on that whether I need to upgrade.