On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 13:41 -0500, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > The downside is that the more commercial distributions have less incentive > to make the administration task easier. Their packages are harder to install > and configure; but so what? Someone's paying them to do things a particular > way. That certainly hasn't been my experience, I find it incredibly easy to install and configure packages on RPM based distributions (which is what this seems to have boiled down to, RPM vs DEB vs PKG(?)). I maintain our RPM repository and packages at work. It's trivial to create, build, rebuild for different architectures, upload and repo-ize them compared to when I've had to dig into our Debian repository to update a package when the guy who maintains that was not available. Sure, some of this comes from having more experience building RPM vs DEB but you cannot deny that the RPM build process is cleaner and more easily reproduced on another system when you need to add a patch, change a compile option, etc. A DEB is a glorified tarball (ARchive actually) that provides you with the files, and some install/uninstall/configure scripts An RPM is a glorified tarball that provides you with the same scripts, and a .spec file that allows you to rebuild an exact copy (and derivations) of the original package. Customized however you see fit without scratching your head wondering what compile flags or patches the original packager used. Also, all patches* made to the official source are kept separate, and applied during the build process. This allows much easier scrutiny of patches and updates. * This is inside a source RPM > The 'laziness' of volunteers breeds a desire to distribute and automate > as much as possible; which benefits the end user by making packages more > widely available (many distributed update servers, instead of a few > centralized ones) and easier to install (.debs offer the option of > configuration at install time, rather than being explicitly non-interactive > like RPMs which can and will break things quietly in the background). I'm confused as to what you're trying to say here, the RPM build process is *much* more easily automated and I see a great deal more Fedora/CentOS mirrors (and third party repositories) than Debian. Obviously RHEL repositories are centralized but it's a distribution you're paying for. Some of those packages are third party software you're buying a license for with RHEL, Red Hat is just the intermediary.