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.
> 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.
I realize I'm veering a bit off-topic :), but I've used Debian for a long while, but I do wonder how is that deb is more sophisticated than rpm?
The one feature I remember (a long time ago) rpm being able to install the different versions of the same package, although I suppose this in practice would only work for packages made for this, and libraries would usually be such packages. With debs this means the version number needs to be embedded to the package name with some developer-chosen precision.
This is still true from what I see, but in both families of distributions this is not a big requirement anymore. In my Debian based systems, libx264 is the only thing which requires multiple versions needs to be installed from what I remember.
On the other hand, RPM still doesn't know about reverse dependencies, automatically/manually installed packages, version holds, etc.
Either one is advanced enough to handle a big distribution and have their advantages w.r.t. each other, but I still prefer .deb as a person who works with both. Also, .deb can encode much more information about the software package it contains.
_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.
_flux · · focus · HN ↗
I realize I'm veering a bit off-topic :), but I've used Debian for a long while, but I do wonder how is that deb is more sophisticated than rpm?
The one feature I remember (a long time ago) rpm being able to install the different versions of the same package, although I suppose this in practice would only work for packages made for this, and libraries would usually be such packages. With debs this means the version number needs to be embedded to the package name with some developer-chosen precision.
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
On the other hand, RPM still doesn't know about reverse dependencies, automatically/manually installed packages, version holds, etc.
Either one is advanced enough to handle a big distribution and have their advantages w.r.t. each other, but I still prefer .deb as a person who works with both. Also, .deb can encode much more information about the software package it contains.