If I remember correctly, the reason why Scientific Linux was RHEL based instead of Debian because RedHat was a company and can pay them for services.
We used to run it on our Grid nodes, and while it was not bad, it was not that smooth, either. It was a little kludgy but worked if you didn't diverge from the happy paths much.
Now Debian has Extended Long Time Support via Freexian, I believe CERN has enough confidence to use Debian instead of RH family, and that will make lives of some people way easier. Debian is still easier to manage than RH based systems, and .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.
> .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.
Perhaps. I wouldn't argue either way, but dpkg still maintains its "data base" of installed and available packages/files as plain text files rather than using a DB format like sqlite (which one might chose for such today) or Berkeley DB (back when). The performance difference is negligible today on fast hosts with NVMe backed storage, but fairly annoying when using lesser machines with slower storage, e.g. RPi with root fs on a SD card.
I don't know the reasons behind the design decisions of apt. I know its workings up to a point, but not the history behind them.
On the other hand, I have been using Kingston Canvas Go SD cards on my Raspberry Pi boards for a fairly long time now, and these cards' random access speed is above and beyond of other, older cards while not being expensive.
_joel · · focus · HN ↗
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
We used to run it on our Grid nodes, and while it was not bad, it was not that smooth, either. It was a little kludgy but worked if you didn't diverge from the happy paths much.
Now Debian has Extended Long Time Support via Freexian, I believe CERN has enough confidence to use Debian instead of RH family, and that will make lives of some people way easier. Debian is still easier to manage than RH based systems, and .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.
guenthert · · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps. I wouldn't argue either way, but dpkg still maintains its "data base" of installed and available packages/files as plain text files rather than using a DB format like sqlite (which one might chose for such today) or Berkeley DB (back when). The performance difference is negligible today on fast hosts with NVMe backed storage, but fairly annoying when using lesser machines with slower storage, e.g. RPi with root fs on a SD card.
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
On the other hand, I have been using Kingston Canvas Go SD cards on my Raspberry Pi boards for a fairly long time now, and these cards' random access speed is above and beyond of other, older cards while not being expensive.
Now apt works like it's running on an SSD.