[tlug] Re: Long-term Stability Distros

[Jim Breen <jimbreen@example.com>]

"Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@example.com> wrote:
> I changed to Debian for exactly the same reasons you are describing.
> Well, that and dependency Hell. I've heard that dependency Hell doesn't
> happen anymore on Red Hat based distros, but i've not had a compelling
> reason to switch back to find out if the rumors are true. I wish all
> systems had a package manager as good as Debian's "aptitude".

Certainly my (rather arms-length) observation has been that Debian has
handled the dependency/upgrade issues very well.
[...]

> I dislike reinstalling and having to reconfigure everything, but with
> Debian i don't have to. I have a web server that was installed with
> Debian 3.1, upgraded to 4.0, and recently to 5.0. All without
> reinstalling, and with very minimal downtime (just reboots to get new
> kernels loaded).

I have observed that too. I "own" an LVS (arakawa.edrdg.org) to which my
dictionary work is migrating. It runs on Debian, and the sysadmin heavy
lifting is mostly done by a friend. He moved up to 5.0 recently quite
painlessly.

Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

> As long as there are dependencies, there will be Dependency Hell. The
> real question is, does your distro give you tools for dealing with it?
> I find Debian / Ubuntu just as frustrating as Red Hat (and other
> RPM-based distros).

What particular Debian frustrations have you?

I must admit that after the discussion here, I am leaning towards a
distro upgrade/change. I may buy a new disk drive (bigger) and do a
fresh install there, so that I have a fall-back.

-- 
Jim Breen
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/