Re: Why *does* slackware suck?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

Charles J Menzes said (apparently two years in the future):
> Sorry to say, but I just havent been swayed to red hat in spite of what
> appears to be a fairly large springfield following. Does anyone want to
> try and give me a list of why slackware they think slackware is inferior
> to Red Hat? In spite of the humor you can read into this, I am really
> genuine in this request...

If you need more reasons, see

    http://www.luci.org/luci-discuss/msg00071.html

The biggest thing, as others have mentioned, is package management.
Slackware has none.  Why should you care?  Well, binary packages are
extremely convenient, and, if done properly, should upgrade a package
while leaving all configuration information intact.  Also, with
dependency checking, you know what additional packages you need to
install to make a particular package work.

Ideally, a package management system should also do things like stop
services & restart them after an upgrade (Debian's does this, Red
Hat's could if the packages were designed properly), fetch packages to
satisfy dependencies, keep backups of any important configuration
files (Red Hat's does this, dunno about Debian) or system binaries
(nobody does this that I'm aware of) that are changed, etc.

Of course, truly using a package management system to its full
potential requires *all* (or almost all) binaries to be installed with
the package manager.  That requires a little bit of discipline.  I
will say this though...  A couple of years ago, I would never have
bothered building rpms for all the stuff I use.  Now, I almost never
have to, and I can justify the occasional minor inconvenience of
building my own rpms.  (I finally patched perl and made an rpm that
builds a shared libperl.so, something I've been waiting for Red Hat to
do for a couple of years.)  This is the exception though...  If you
look at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/, there are rpms for almost
everything you can think of, including stuff like the latest apache
beta.  Anyway, once I get some of my weirder programs built as rpms, I
know I can drop them on every one of my systems.  (That includes
several glibc and libc5 x86 systems and an alpha.)  No, the binaries
aren't portable, but the source rpms should be...  A simple "rpm
--rebuild foo.src.rpm" gives me a binary rpm of foo on whatever system
I happen to be on at the time.  That is just cool.

Read the post at that URL.  I mention a few other things that are
*very* big strikes against Slackware.  (Some are also strikes against
Stampede, in case anyone has considered looking at that.)

Oh, BTW, if you have a rpm but don't have rpm (the program) handy,
just use this perl script to convert it to a gzip'd cpio archive:

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    $magic="\037\213";
    $/=$magic;
    $_=<>;
    undef $/;
    $_=<>;
    print $magic;
    print;

Enjoy.  :-)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Linux Users of Central Illinois
(217)698-1694             | Meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.luci.org/ for more info

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