[ale] linus doesn't like Debian?

John Heim jheim at math.wisc.edu
Fri Aug 24 17:24:10 EDT 2007


You do know that the girly-man comment was a joke, right? I did include a 
smiley.   I don't mind a serious reply to a tongue-in-cheeck remark as long 
as you realize I was just goofin'.

Besides, we all know that just running linux, any distro, is manly.  :-)

This is true though... When I first got into linux, I was at some kind of 
party and I heard some guys talking about linux. So I kind of butted into 
the conversation and asked "Yeah, I'm into linux too. I run Red Hat. What 
distro do you guys run?" -- like I know what I'm talking about. I had only 
just  found out there was more than one kind of linux. So the guy across 
from me says, "Well, I built my own distro."

Okay, you win.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Lightner" <jlightner at water.com>
To: ale at ale.org
To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 1:32 PM
Subject: Re: [ale] linus doesn't like Debian?


> You're implying there's something wrong with being a girly man?  You're
> not in the Seinfeld "not that there's anything wrong with that" camp?
> (For the record I'm not gay - not that there's anything wrong with
> that.)
>
> Having worked on AT&T UNIX, SCO XENIX & UNIX, NEC's Astrix, NCR UNIX,
> AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Dynix and probably others I've forgotten along with
> distros such as Caldera, Debian, Fedora and RedHat (not to mention
> embedded Linux in NAS, BigIP F5) and Vmware not to mention various
> applications and databases on enterprise class systems I think I've got
> all the "technical" work I can handle.
>
> My point was if we're just making distros for us geeks why aren't we all
> just getting all the source and building from scratch?  For that matter
> why aren't we all "he-men" enough to write and run our own operating
> systems rather than being so namby-pamby as to rely on OSS communities?
>
>
> There is nothing prohibiting anyone from downloading and compiling
> source on any distro (including Fedora) and many reasons why you would
> want to even if there were precompiled packages available.   My comments
> about source were to point out what I saw as incongruities in the
> arguments.
>
> I don't mind folks preferring one distro over another - I do mind
> opinion presented as fact especially when BS is posted about another
> distro to try to support their opinion.  As I noted in my post (in upper
> case no less) I knew what I was saying was "OPINION".  It just often
> appears to me that some folks pretend they are posting fact when the
> "fact" is that it is only their opinions.  Talking about rpm failings
> from years ago as if they were the biggest impediment to Linux adoption
> today ignores recent history.   This is essentially a "religious
> argument" and as such won't ever be won.  (Shouting the loudest isn't a
> win - it's just a recognition that you can't formulate intelligent
> arguments.)
>
> Of course my comment about Linus supporting Fedora was meant to be
> tongue in cheek but that doesn't always seem apparent in text.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of John
> Heim
> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 2:05 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] linus doesn't like Debian?
>
> From: "Jeff Lightner" <jlightner at water.com>
>> The comment about dependency hell was a reference to what occurred
>> before yum - one would try to install an rpm only to be told they
> needed
>> another rpm which in turn would require another and so on.  Yum on the
>> other hand will let you pick the package you're interested in and find
>> the dependencies needed to install it on YOUR system and install those
>> at the same time.
>
> I think the reference is actually to the circular dependencies problem
> that
> used to be so common. I switched from Red Hat to debian a few years ago.
> But
> you used to get a situation where package A would depend on B and B
> would
> depnd on C and C would depend on A. Supposedly you could force it to
> install
> A which would break the loop. But that didn't always work.
>
> Friends of mine tell me that never happens any more. Besides, it can
> happen
> in debian apt too. It's funny because when I first switched to debian, I
> had
> way fewer problems with apt than I have had recently. Try upgrading from
>
> sarge to etch, it is very difficult.
>
>> are superior to Fedora I'll just ask "Then why does Linus Torvalds run
>> Fedora?".  I'll get all sorts of OPINIONS which aren't any better than
>> mine but will have the satisfaction of knowing that the guy that
> started
>> it all agrees with me.
>
> Okay, girly-man. If you want to run a "non technical" distro. That's
> what
> Linus said, after all. He doesn't touch the technical or compile
> everything
> distros.
> :-)
>
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