Debian questions

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Quoting cdowns <cdowns at drippingdead.com>:

> Debian will do all the things you need 
> without a problem, probably even easier :) there are no depency problems 
> like the RedHat World.

Oh come on.  I've had just as much trouble installing tarballs on systems as I 
have RPM's, I can't believe that Debian apps magically don't have library 
dependencies.  Apt-get may be great at resolving them, but if you get a poorly 
packaged program, or something for a different version or release, or if your 
system falls behind on updates and you try to install something current, you're 
going to have the same problem as RedHat or Mandrake.

Because RedHat went so long without any automatic dependency resolution, it got 
a bad rap, but the GUI package managers (bad as they are) have been working on 
it at least as long as apt-get.  Mandrake's urpmi, when properly configured, 
resolves, finds, and installs dependencies beautifully, and as long as you stay 
strictly within the RedHat universe (a good idea if it's a production system), 
up2date will handle everything for you too.

That said, Debian's a great distro, one of the Great Old Ones like Slackware 
and SuSE. 

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